grow this

To My Husband of 25 Years

2012-01-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

"Most like an arch-two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean...

" It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another's sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight."

- John Ciardi, Most Like and Arch This Marriage

This isn't how we planned it. How could we not have realized that we'd grow old? But here we stand, holding on to each other's arms for support; two weaknesses leaning blissfully into each other to make a strong marriage. It's been quite an adventure so far. So, what's next? I'm signing on for another 25. Another quote, this time from Dag Hammarskjold:

For all that has been, thanks
For all that will be, yes.

Stir Fried Rice and Advance Directives

2012-01-18T10:30:00.001-08:00

"If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?"
Chuck Palahniuk

If I were nominated to serve on the Supreme Court, Congress probably wouldn’t approve me. I hasten to add that it’s not what you’re thinking: i.e. because my dues to the California Bar Association are almost ten years overdue. It’s the other criminal activity I have engaged in during the course of my lightly checkered past. Let’s face it, who hasn’t at one time or another committed an illegal act like, say, failing to return library books on time.

I was reminded that today when I went to make pork fried rice to use up the leftover pork shoulder roast. My favorite Chinese food cookbook is “Victor Sen Yung’s Great Wok Cookbook”. You might know this author as “Hop Sing, the Chinese cook on the ‘Bonanza’ TV series”. My copy of this 1974 edition was due at the Department of Public Libraries, Montgomery County, Maryland, Silver Spring a while back. Specifically: 2/14/75.

In my defense, I was moving to San Diego then, and plus the book is really good, notwithstanding that I didn’t particularly care for Bonanza and the homoerotic overtones of all those guys riding horses; or that I envied Little Joe’s perfect frosted hair. Perhaps not so strangely, he’s (Victor, not Little Joe) never steered me wrong, or should I say, “stirred” me wrong, particularly when making fried rice.

Which isn’t a terribly smooth segue to the topic of today’s post: posting about stuff besides gardening. In fact, it’s no segue at all: from stir fried rice to blogging -- unless you want to consider the existential similarity that when either are good, they are very very good, and when they are bad they are inedible, or illiterate, or both.

Truman Capote famously distinguished between what he called writing and what he called typing. I am not so discriminating, I carelessly type my outrage du jour or whatever I’m inspired to write by what I happen to be reading. I submit that sometimes typing is the best way to vent, particularly when you have, over the years, had your own personal spell-check learn all manner of profanities, thus preventing it from whinging about their prolific use.

But back to posting. I make no apologies. My garden blog has, much like my life, overflowed the tidy stack of garden-oid topics like a stack of 2011 financial stuff being assembled for the tax lady that I just knocked over this afternoon. Like this once tidy stack, like my blog, now spills all over the floor with posts about train rides, fried rice, lethally incompetent bureaucrats, and the therapeutic benefits of posting the accumulating evidence that there must be some conspiracy that is making me feel old, sore, tired and in need of updating my advance directive.

Which brings me back to the other part of the title of this post: Advance Directives, updating. After due consideration, I’d like mine to depart from the state-approved form into a more creative writing exercise. I’m still polishing my customized AD but here’s what I’ve got so far:

In the event that one – no make that two – or more of the following conditions are manifested in my behavior:
a) Drooling even when sober;
b) Wearing diapers someone else has to change;
c) Letting my once excellent personal hygiene practices slide like congealing gravy down a volcano of mashed potatoes on a chipped dinner plate;
d) Become just another tedious old lady whose spittle-punctuated rants involve rage at inanimate objects that piss me off;
e) I happen to wake up one morning as a different person and cease to be the devoted, compassionate and generous friend/relative/sister/favorite aunt who you all know and love:

I hereby authorize my authorized representative to respectfully hold a pillow against my face so I can “Say goodnight to Mr. Pillow”, subject however, to the following:

In the event that said authorized representative determines that greater comedic value can be realized thereby, authorized representative is hereby authorized instead to dress me like a Franciscan nun and write with a magic marker on my pristine white over starched bib: This is what happens if you don’t make the Nine First Fridays, or you have sex before marriage; and prop me in a folding chair along the path to the parking lot after Mass. (For the record, I must have made 8/9 of dozens of First Fridays and effort should count here).

Notwithstanding the foregoing however, and subject to all the other provisions of this advance directive without regard to the degree said provisions may be found inconsistent or simply contradictory, please change my diaper sometimes.

(Finally, imagine you were trying to set a record for keywords or labels for a post that were extremely unlikely to be seen in each others' company. If you were, I just did.)

Sleeping on a Train

2012-01-15T11:14:00.000-08:00

"In the morning I came awake as I always do, like a man trapped in a car going over a cliff." -- Russell Hoban, The Medusa Frequency

It sounded like a good idea – taking the train from the bottom of California to the top of Oregon. I have the time and the scenery alternates between lovely and imaginative in a surrealistic kind of way. Between Richmond and Oakland, there are miles and miles of trackside graffiti, some of it displaying a sophisticated use of color and line, and some of it clearly violating the Sponge Bob franchise copyright.

Only it takes a long time. The first leg, from San Diego to LA is just over 2.5 hours. The trip from LA to Portland is a nice round 30 hours. Together, the trip is, let’s see now, wait for it: too damn long. And that’s not counting a layover of several hours in the gorgeous art deco station at LA. The experience is spoiled a bit when armed police demand to be shown tickets in order to prevent beggars and homeless people from living in the nice comfortable chairs in the nice heated station. Only the police don’t prevent it, managing instead only to keep the desperately poor people moving and sleep-deprived and a bit cranky.

The accommodations in what is disingenuously not called steerage are tantalizingly almost comfy. Although the seats provide more foot room than first class airline seats, and although they not only recline to about 45 degrees they also include an occasionally functional shelf under the seat designed to lift up your lower leg at a 30-degree angle, they don't promote an optimal sleeping experience. The idea that with the seat reclined and the footrest thingie raised is that you get to attempt to sleep stretched out in a zig and then a zag, a bit like sleeping on three steps of a narrow padded staircase.

The seats take away in width what they give in length. They also lack a center arm, acquainting you with your seatmate perhaps a bit more than would be desired. When you try to sleep, you find yourself snuggled up against a stranger close enough to smell the beer he/she had in the billiard room or whatever they call the car with the bar.

Then there’s the other passengers sleeping in the same room: the smokers making a stampede to the doors when station stops are longer than 30 seconds, the lurching drunks, the fussing babies, the kicking toddlers, and the sprawling sleeping teenage girls whose untidy luggage in matching plastic grocery bags migrates to the center aisle while they fling the stray arm or leg out to snag the wary traveler.

And don’t get me started on the restrooms. In fact, competent Amtrack staff manage to keep the restrooms mostly tidy, if a bit under-ventilated. Too bad passengers seem intent on bathing (or perhaps doing their laundry) in the miniature sinks while managing to spray water throughout the tiny compartments and not bothering to wipe it up. Perhaps such careless behavior is prompted by the signs on the mirrors saying Clean Up After Yourself without using the word “Please”. How rude, am I right?

In the end, apart from discovering that I am too old to enjoy the adventure of spending two days and a night on trains with strangers, I found my faith in my fellow travelers renewed. People are generally kind, tolerant, and quick to aid one another. An older man saw me taking pictures out the window and stopped by to advise me of an approaching photo op. A younger man saw me struggling to place my suitcase in an overhead bin and quickly did the job for me without even being asked.

A guy in the café car told me the small bottles of red wine were chilled adjacent to the white (!) but would be warmed up just right by the time we made it to through the five intervening cars to the last car we both occupied. I had the perfect lunch. A grandma with a small child shared a sympathetic smile as she saw me cringe away from my zaftig seatmate during the dark of an almost endless night.

And best of all, the gentle swaying of the train, accompanied by the squeaks and rattles and bumps is one of the most soothing experiences in the world.

Out of the Dark

2011-12-31T12:49:00.000-08:00

After a million years of shining
The sun doesn’t say to the earth –
‘You owe me.’
Imagine a love like this.
-- Hafiz

A day outside like spring, mild in the low 70s and sunny. Because I’m leaving for 10 days, I watered because we haven’t heard the sound of rain in a while. While rain would be a sound for sore ears right now, I expect my wish will be granted in Portland OR. So, I went outside to say hello to the sun as it begins it journey back north, lengthening my days by merely perceptible moments. But something inside me feels the change and knows we’re heading back into the sun.

My petite lemons in the shade nevertheless seem to glow in the reflected light, and to sparkle with the dewy secret of their ripeness. The sprinkler drops have yet to dry on their fragrant skin; their fragrance is a presence in the air nearby, smelling like sunshine.

I see the sun everywhere in the yard this afternoon. This is a good time and a good place to thank my love for this year and bid it gone and, and to imagine more love for everyone in the new year about to begin.

Goodbye 2011, and Good Riddance

2011-12-19T11:30:00.001-08:00

“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies.”
 ~Homer, Iliad

I’ve been caught up in a plague of stupid. It's too soon to tell if it's fatal.

My recent visit to the Cardiac Nurse Practitioner to recount my increasingly troublesome symptoms and drug side effects was another exercise in futility that always ceases to amaze me. My concerns were met with a blank uncaring shrug and the advice to increase my medications. I've experienced better bedside manner from hospital nurse call buttons. I've experienced more compassion from Chase Bank.

Trying to explain the details of how Chase Bank has once again screwed me would make my eyes bleed, and reading them would make your heart break. That is, unless you already suspected what the greedy, rapacious, inept thieves at Chase Bank do for a living. I've experienced more competence from the California Department of Human Services.

Meanwhile, my friends at California DHS have embarked on yet another round of vague demands for further documentation before ruling on an application for a family member to receive MediCal. In case you’re playing along at home, this is the fourth time they have demanded, and I have submitted, documents to validate the qualifications of the applicant. I have to wonder how many potential applicants simply give up, pack their belongings into a grocery cart, and move into the nearest alley to await death.

If 2011 was a patient on life support, I would tattoo "DNR" on it's forehead. The winter winds can't scatter the misfortunes of 2011 like dead leaves on the ground soon enough for me.

RIP Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-16T10:39:00.000-08:00

‘From quiet homes and first beginnings, out to the undiscovered ends, there’s nothing worth the wear of winning but laughter and the love of friends’
Hilaire Belloc’s ’Dedicatory Ode’

Christopher Hitchens died the other day.

To me, Hitchens was an inspired writer. His writing was articulate, amazing, cogent and sparkling throughout with literary gems and original thoughts. He was a master who could craft the perfectly expressed thought and clearly present the most inspired original idea. He could nail the most devastating argument; or voice the most scornfully appropriate criticism; or coin the most delightful term. And because we were both the same age, and shared a similar taste for dark humor, I persuaded myself that I had at least something in common with this complex man whose writing has given me such pleasure over the years – even when I disagreed with him.

You can probably find dozens of tributes by his famous admirers, and samples of his writing on line (here’s one of my favorites) but I particularly was struck by the impromptu eulogy in his brother Richard’s blog today, and from which I take Belloc’s poem quoted above. The post thanks people for their kind wishes and then takes Christopher’s courage as its topic:

“Much of civilisation rests on the proper response to death, simple unalloyed kindness, the desire to show sympathy for irrecoverable less, the understanding that a unique and irreplaceable something has been lost to us. If we ceased to care, we wouldn’t be properly human…

“Here’s a thing I will say now without hesitation, unqualified and important. The one word that comes to mind when I think of my brother is ‘courage’. By this I don’t mean the lack of fear which some people have, which enables them to do very dangerous or frightening things because they have no idea what it is to be afraid. I mean a courage which overcomes real fear, while actually experiencing it…

“He would always rather fight than give way, not for its own sake but because it came naturally to him…

“Courage is deliberately taking a known risk, sometimes physical, sometimes to your livelihood, because you think it is too important not to… I’ve mentioned here before C.S.Lewis’s statement that courage is the supreme virtue, making all the others possible. It should be praised and celebrated, and is the thing I‘d most wish to remember…”

Peter Hitchens on the death of his brother Christopher Hitchens on 12/15/11

Margins of Error

2011-12-10T09:53:00.000-08:00

The bells jostle in the tower
The lonely night amid.
And on my tongue the taste is sour
Of all I ever did.
- A.E. Houseman

The days are getting shorter, but soon they will begin to grow marginally longer. There is something about December that makes one think of endings more than beginnings. I always take a deep breath of relief when I make it to the winter solstice. It feels to me like I have rounded the racetrack once more and crossed the finish line to begin another lap. Right now though, tonight is the last full moon of 2011, and I'm not quite at the line, and sorrow dogs my steps.

Right now, as I approach the end of the final lap of the lunar year, the doubts and regrets I carry are heavy, and I keep my thoughts from freezing only by blowing on the last coal of slowly smoldering anger deep inside. If I can hold on another ten days, we can chuckle at the tired family joke – always told on 22 December – about how the days seem to be getting longer.

I came across an old poem I’d saved many years ago on a similar dim December day, and I imagine its speaker must have been writing it on a similar day. It’s a sort of science fiction imagining of a post-apocalyptic future, and it has seeped into my restless dreams, accompanied by the mysterious thumps and squeaks the dark house makes in the night.

I know I should lighten up, just like Houseman should have. It's going to be close this year, but I estimate I have just enough energy left to make it to the solstice. I can only hope my estimate is within the margin of error. After that, things will begin to look up. Which is more than you can say for the people who left this epistle behind.

Blogger removes the lovely spacing of this poem and makes it into solid blocks below. You should really appreciate the poem as the author wrote it by clicking on the link at the end of the poem.

...It is colder now
there are many stars
we are drifting
North by the Great Bear
the leaves are falling
The water is stone in the scooped rock
to southward
Red sun grey air
the crows are
Slow on their crooked wings
the jays have left us
Long since we passed the flares of Orion
Each man believes in his heart he will die
Many have written last thoughts and last letters
None know if our deaths are now or forever
None know if this wandering earth will be found

We lie down and the snow covers our garments
I pray you
you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names
I will tell you all we have learned
I will tell you everything
The earth is round
there are springs under the orchards
The loam cuts with a blunt knife
beware of
Elms in thunder
the lights in the sky are stars
We think they do not see
we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us
The birds too are ignorant
do not listen
Do not stand at dark in the open windows
We before you have heard this
they are voices
They are not words at all but the wind rising
Also noone among us has seen God
(... We have thought often
the flaws of sun in the late and driving weather
pointed to one tree but it was not so.)
As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous
The wind changes at night and the dreams come

It is very cold
there are strange stars near Arcturus
Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky

Archibald MacLeish, Epistle To Be Left In The Earth

My Tax Dollars At Work, Not to Mention My Public Education System

2011-12-07T10:12:00.001-08:00

I have been dancing with California Department of Health and Human Services since September to apply for benefits for a family member. Because they routinely lose papers sent via mail, I have braved the online application system. This system is fraught with its own perils, mostly associated with attaching documents to verify various and sundry things about the applicant's status. In response to my latest attempt to reply to an earlier request for additional verifications, I received this message this morning.

I have altered the following document only to remove the case number at the beginning and the lengthly privacy notice at the end. I have also, mercifully, deleted the name of the person who sent the following:

Good Morning,

Case number XXXXXXX

Thank you for emailing us at ACCESS Center. We apologized, we do not
processed paperworks here at ACCESS. I will just send your
verifications to the imaging to be imaged and so the worker who will
processed your case and see these verification provided.

Thank you.

“Please feel free to contact ACCESS again if you have any additional
questions. Thank you….”

Await Anticipation

2011-12-02T15:52:00.000-08:00

“I Like You. I’ll Kill You Last.”

- My favorite Hallmark birthday card ever

Douglas Adams once wrote two sentences that sum up my day so far. I’ve been trying to tilt my virtual lance at the metaphorical windmill of Internet banking. Got knocked off my faithful steed within the first nanosecond I tried to access my account so I could balance my checkbook prior to paying bills. Now, balancing my checkbook is fraught with peril at the best of times, but today has been more perilous than most in recent memory. (Good thing recent memory goes no farther than 48 hours.) I had to offer up the name of my first pet to even get through the door of the credit union online banking site. A dark foreboding filled my veins like ice water filling your boot as you step onto the thin ice.

But I was talking about Douglas Adams. Here’s his existential brainteaser: "He hoped and prayed that there wasn't an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn't an afterlife."

In the event that there is an afterlife, consider this post my sincere, desperate, hope and prayer that incompetent bureaucrats get their guts eaten out for all eternity while they’re chained to rocks like that mythological character What’s His Name.

In a completely unrelated but equally baffling message from beyond, there was a marquee on the church down the hill from me that said “Expect Hope”. This infuriates me, and not just the gratuitous capitalization. Next week will they have something else repetitious and redundant and not to mention content-free like “Believe Faith”? I hope not, but I expect so.

For someone constantly on the lookout for meaning, I can only take these recent events as a clear message that the end of civilization is near.

Once I was a bureaucrat myself. I know firsthand how depressing the quotidian existence of one who is paid too little to sort forms at a metal desk where one’s predecessor died of a massive stroke while sorting an earlier version of the same forms. So, there is a special place in my heart for the bureaucrats who have been pecking at my own guts while I try to comply with The State, the Internet, and the “would you like to complete a survey about our service?” pop-up windows.

Unfortunately for us all, that special place in my heart has been clogged with atherosclerotic plaque and slowly shriveled into a blackened scab through which blood flow is only a distant memory. So I merely hope.

Muddy Water = Sleepless Nights

2011-11-28T10:36:00.001-08:00

“Do the things external which fall upon thee distract thee? Give thyself time to learn something new and good, and cease to be whirled around. But then thou must also avoid being carried about the other way. For those too are triflers who have wearied themselves in life by their activity, and yet have no object to which to direct every movement, and, in a word, all their thoughts. “ - Marcus Aurelius. The Meditations

Sound advice, right? Wrong. Although he doesn’t say so, Marcus surely knows there is often a fine line between trying to learn something new and good, and wearying oneself by such activity. It comes down to finding a way to govern one’s thoughts.

We have all had nights when our body is tired and wants to rest, while our thoughts are flitting around from past to future, from regrets to hopes, and from thought to unrelated thought like a 9-year-old on a Kool-Aid jag.

On such nights, I find Marcus Aurelius to be a bit of a pedantic jerk, full of what purports to be wisdom but empty of a single practical idea for living a peaceful life. I’m unable to sleep anyway, so I might as well fault this preachy pedantic philosopher as admit that while I toss and turn I’m merely stirring up the mud from the bottom of the pool of thought inside my head.

Even that kid with ADD running around on a playground knows that if you stop stirring a muddy pool of water with a stick, it will gradually become clear.

“Who can make the muddy water clear? Let it be still, and it will gradually become clear. Who can secure the condition of rest? Let movement go on, and the condition of rest will gradually arise.” - Lao-tzu, The Tao-te Ching

The More You Know...

2011-11-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

“If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?”

Pink Floyd

Happy thanksgiving everybody.

A Storm for Every Calm

2011-11-17T11:54:00.000-08:00

“Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, — though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, — in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life; we do not advance through fixed gradations, and at the last one pause: — through infancy’s unconscious spell, boyhood’s thoughtless faith, adolescence’ doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of If. But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally. Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more? In what rapt ether sails the world, of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling’s father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them: the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there to learn it.” - Herman Melville

I am not generally one for drinking away my sorrows, but I was driven to try last week - and not just because it was raining outdoors and gloomy in. November 13 was a sad anniversary for me; one toasted with B&B and a PG Netflix movie. Of late, my “pondering repose of If” more closely resembles a heavy mental lumber through the deck of memories – more ponderous than pondering. The focus of my attention devoted to pondering of “If” has narrowed its beam light a dying flashlight down the damp basement steps to replace a fuse. Last week, I was so sad I would have traded my tickets to the moon for a couple of metaphorical C batteries and a pair of shoes with insulated soles.

So, to cheer myself up (this was before the B&B) I tried to think of a funny joke. Hmmm….

One of the funniest jokes in the world, to me, has always been: Why do elephants drink? Why? To forget. Now, to appreciate why the answer to this riddle was so hilarious when I was 10, you need to know the precursor cliché about elephants never forgetting. So, the joke has built-in nod-and-wink to those of us clever enough (like I was at 10) to know the secret handshake to decode this shibboleth of a joke. It’s even funnier as I age and begin to consider how hard it must be for an elephant to actually drink enough to get drunk, given its body weight.

Melville totally captures a bleak time when the earth has been long parched by the dead drought of earthy life. And I totally relate to his comparison of this soul-deep inborn longing to return to the cool dew in the Garden of Eden as it was before snakes invaded. The halting and stumbling progress of our lives toward some imagined “If” is, Melville seems to say, is a journey with an end shrouded in riddles like a dilemma, inside an enigma, wrapped in bacon. Like a hilarious riddle but with the punch line we don’t quite get until we die.

If I had a dollar for every time I wandered from “… doubt (the common doom), then scepticism, then disbelief, resting at last in manhood’s pondering repose of "If". If only I had a dollar. If only. Fifty cents. I'd be richer than Oprah.
If. But. But it’s sunny today. Today at least, I get a brief remission in the symptoms of my seasonal affective disorder. If only it would stay this way.

La Plus Ca Change

2011-11-11T15:03:00.001-08:00

The Women of Darius Invoking the Clemency of Alexander

"A widow is like a frigate of which the first captain has been shipwrecked."
- Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I'm wondering if anybody else has noticed this. There are two parallel news stories that are almost more instructive in the coverage they are receiving than in their content. One is the boy child rape at Penn State. The other is the sexual harassment/assault of grown women by Herman Cain. Both of these stories are about sordid things that happened years ago and are just now coming to light. And yet…

Our national news the media is shocked, SHOCKED, that little boys were sodomized all those years ago and they’re just now hearing about it. The outrage and righteous indignation at the victimization of young boys is breathtaking. Nobody seems to be questioning at all whether these incidents really took place.

The Herman Cain story: not quite so much shock and outrage. Victims of Cain’s sexual abuse are being called – predictably – sluts out for money preying on a virtuous powerful man. The few stories that attempt to be fair and/or balanced to the accusers still pepper their concerns with weak conditional language: alleged, unproven, “he said/she said” and shit. Cain thinks it's all a conspiracy at worst or a joke at best. He called Speaker Pelosi “Princess Nancy” at the recent debate, and was overheard (by Fox news) making a joke about Anita Hill. That guy kills. Is this our image of a Man's Man? Sad.

While I am perfectly aware that there are many places in this world where women treated very much worse by clueless men who are little more than spoiled old children, watching these cases unfold in public simply confirms that discrimination against women happens pretty much all over the world. But here and now, in the virtual community telling us the story of these two cases of sex abuse of a weaker person by a stronger person. And by weaker person, I mean women, and by a stronger person, I mean men.

No matter how enlightened we (and our media) like to think we are about all y'all connivin' bitches, the different approaches to these two different stories, strangely, both reflect the same double standard: Guilt by Gender. Like dirty linen drying on the rope above a sooty alley, our gender-biased judgments are all the more shameful because they are almost subconscious.

Women who are sexually abused and speak out are subjected to something cruel that looks to me a lot like a presumption of guilt. But let a different class of powerless people (who just happen to have penises) be sexually mistreated, and suddenly we will have to fire the entire chain of authority and pay millions to make it right. Otherwise, those poor victims might be further victimized. When the poor Penn State victims do come forward, should we consider whether they might just have been asking for it?

One might argue that the difference that makes it so much sadder is that the mistreatment of boys was witnessed and that of the women was not. Not true. "Allegedly", other people saw Cain being a dick to women and actually told him to cool it. How nice of them, and how nice for the ladies. They also told the man raping boys to cut it out. End of story. But in Cain’s case, there were settlement agreements for Crissake. That is an acknowledgement that - notwithstanding that something inappropriate and possibly illegal happened - we all agree to exchange some money to keep it quiet. In the Penn State cases, it's (as of now) unproven "he said/they said."

The only difference with the boys is that they’ll receive their (probably costlier) settlement much longer after the fact; and of course, that we’ll all feel really sorry for them, poor kids. Meanwhile, let’s drag those “ugly,” “bleach blond” tramps through the mud for daring to challenge a respected (!) man. And should the abused boys accept a settlement? When they do, should they have to sign a non-disclosure agreement in consideration for their hush money?

Ironic isn't it, the guy who is most famous for his epigram in the title of this post considered women no more than vessels who needed men to steer them. It's sad isn't it, that Al Karr would probably identify with the level of respect given to women today. Douche.

Winterize Your Robots!

2011-11-06T13:38:00.001-08:00

"The world is full of fickle people/
you old friend aren’t one/
inspired you write like a god/
drunk you’re crazier still/
enjoying white hair and idle days/
blue clouds now rise before you/
how many times will you still sleep/
with a jug of wine by your bed."
-- Kao Shih, To Chang Hsu after Drinking, Quoted in Poems of the Masters, China’s Classic Anthology of T’and and Sung Dynasty Verse, Red Pine, trans.

Winter is here. Hibernation has begun. I’ve lived so long here that the first rain announces winter’s arrival somewhere inside me. Despite the relative mildness of our Zone 9 winters, I have acclimated. All that is left of my roots - those east coast Mid-Atlantic snow days of yesteryear - is the fond memories.

The first big rain sooths my soul and that’s what winter feels like today after a long hot summer and a mild and warm Indian Summer. It is time to put away my tools and leave the garden behind. It’s almost time to make Dad’s eggnog, aka Bot Nog, with Southern Comfort. Almost time to turn to my indoor self; cook comfort food with last summer’s canned tomato sauce; and make your pasta from scratch.

And it is time to sew. I’ve got a date with the Pfaff-Whisperer. He’s booked for six weeks. But I scored an appointment for him to service Pfaff Creative, aka F Sewing Machine, right after Thanksgiving. I take the FSM to rehab at the end of November. I’m thinking I need a new name for FSM if I’ve got a prayer of learning how to use it by emphasizing the fucking positive and burying the burning regret and failure in the Springfield Tire Fire inside my head, where its smoldering ashes will give off toxic smoke that will cast a pall on the my attempts to approach this year’s learning curve with anything shorter than a fully-extended fire truck ladder. Seasonal affective Disorder, or psychotic break? You decide.

This gives me from now til the end of the month to get the F Quilt off the Dustbin of History shelf and tear out last year’s stubborn mistakes. My simple plan is to complete the FQ and get on to the next quilt that will surely be a thing of beauty, and a joy forever. Last spring, I met my latest quilting waterloo, folded it resentfully and put it in the I Hate You Closet, and then went outside to play.

Do I hear you say it's time for me to face the FQ with courage and valor, not with smoldering hate. You might counsel me to approach this coming indoor season’s cabin fever with a better attitude. To which I say, screw you. So, as I turn the clocks back that I should have turned back yesterday, I have to ask myself: how many times have I slept with a jug of wine by my bed?

But who’s counting? Not me, anyway. Thanks to an alcohol-induced rapidly deteriorating short term memory best described as intermittent with chance of hallucinations. And you don't even have to sleep at a Comfort Inn Express to know that's wack.

So, winterize now, gardeners. Time for comfort food and drink and living large off summer’s bounty. To the Quilting Cave!

Utility vs. Beauty

2011-10-26T14:08:00.000-07:00

“The landscape gardener attempts to establish a sort of hierarchy of nature, based on much the same principle as that which distinguishes a gentleman by his incapacity to do any useful work. Directly it is proved that a plant or a tree is good for food, it is expelled from the flower garden without any regard to its intrinsic beauty.”
Reginald Blomfield, The Formal Garden in England, 1892, as quoted in The Royal Horticultural Society treasury of garden writing, Charles Elliott, Ed.

As a genteel retired person of leisure, I prefer to refer to it not as my incapacity to do any useful work; but as my failure to find any use for work. I am not exactly the 99%, having a pension and health insurance; both vanishing privileges of the working class I no longer belong to. I belong in the sane class of gentlemen as the bird in my distant birdbath. These days, I spend more time splashing around and having fun, than I do trying to clean up.

If this were a blog that strives to contribute to the discourse of ideas, I’d be saying WTF, or words to that effect. If this was such a blog however, I’d have to forgo reading Chinese poetry and resume reading The Nation, something I can only read after the caffeine has diluted my blood system sufficiently enough to give me the energy to get mad without stroking out. These days, my coffee lasts barely long enough for me to get some news (by which I mean news) and some politics (by which I mean what passes for news). There are enough people out there, most of them more literate than I (well, in all modesty, maybe not most) who can better express my discouragement with what passes for governing and leadership.

Instead, I think I’ll take issue with Reginald who, back in 1892, was whining about people planting flowers instead of fruit. Let’s assume he was speaking with his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek when he proclaimed there is a landscaping “hierarchy of nature” wherein a plant is chosen for it’s beauty which is inversely proportional to its utility. In case he was serious: apple trees flower, Reginald. They are useful and beautiful and would never be expelled from my garden – if I could grow apples, that is. So go suck a fruit I can grow in my yard – a lemon.

Unless of course, you are like me and waiting for your delicate Meyer lemons to ripen. The fruit on Eureka lemon trees are now ripe. Problem is, tough Eureka lemons have a rind as thick and gnarly as a gardener’s elbow, and only marginally more appealing. The hybrids like Meyer lemons will not ripen until early in the new year. Meyers have a dainty rind suitable for marmalades or other candied fates. The fruit on my dwarf Meyer is the size of a golf ball and solid green. They’re so adorable; they look like baby limes.

I would sooner expel my few flowering chrysanthemums from my yard than my lemon tree. My lemon tree is useful as well as beautiful. So thanks, Meyer, for maintaining these two traits that I - as a gentle old person of leisure - no longer bring to my garden in measurable quantities.

This Year's View

2011-10-22T15:08:00.001-07:00

Alone on a river tower my thoughts full of sorrow
The moonlight like the water, the water like the sky
Where is the person with whom I shared the moon?
The view isn’t quite the same as last year.

- Chao Ku, Reflections at a River Tower
(From Red Pine, Trans., Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse)

About this time last year, I was embarking on a cross-country road trip with J.

Today, J is in Afghanistan, listening to the Taliban preach and pray over loudspeakers.

So, yeah.

A Lovely Vacation

2011-10-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

“This time she came upon a large flower-bed, with a border of daisies, and a willow-tree growing in the middle.
‘O Tiger-lily,’ said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind, “I wish you could talk!”
“We can talk,” said the Tiger-lily: “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872

The life of a hermit in a hut with a calligraphy pen and some green tea has its charms. I could live high in the pointy Chinese mountains writing haiku and listening to the soft hiss of falling snow. At least for a while. And at least if I had a good wireless connection. I have recently decided however, that life is simply about finding people worth talking to.

Having spent some time with interesting extended family members recently, I realize that I am just another social animal like the rest of youse (sic) guys. I enjoy talking about what we blandly call politics, because these are interesting times and we were in an interesting place. There are many tasty topics that provide food for thought, and discussion, and disagreement. One of my brothers who didn’t make it to NYC last week, once famously refused to agree to disagree – just for the sake of keeping the conversation going. It’s just as well, because his opinions are stupid. I say that, of course, with all respect due to those who don’t happen to share my enlightened and informed opinions. The best sign I saw from an Occupy Wall Street protester was: The worst thing about censorship is XXXXX.

I proved to my satisfaction that I can’t stay up drinking with the youngsters until 3:00 in the morning. I surrendered to the chocolate on my pillow at 1:30. The next day, some of us strolled through Soho and had lunch in an Italian restaurant in Little Italy. The restroom in this place complied with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) as well as my above brother complied with the rules of civil conversation. And by this I mean that the restroom was about the size of the window on your browser, and that my brother is stupid.

So, now I’m back home looking for botanical conversations with my plants. And considering the alternative, that’s a good thing: because either my plants can talk to me, or I’m hearing voices in my head. Given these choices, I’m going outside to say good morning to my morning glories.

Ten-Four, Eleanor

2011-10-04T12:48:00.000-07:00

"SOCRATES (loftily): Mortal, what do you want with me?
STREPSIADES: First, what are you doing up there? Tell me, I beseech you.
SOCRATES (Pompously): I am traversing the air and contemplating the sun."

- Aristophanes, The Clouds

I’m traversing the air to NYC where I might join in the demonstration and get my protest on.

Then, I’m off to Detroit where I will contemplate nothing more complex than a good book and some good coffee, and maybe a political demonstration about local school board politics.

Then, I’ll traverse the air back to California and contemplate sewing with a twin needle. Neither pompous nor lofty. Just fun.

Cold Morning Skies, Porn Names, and Winter Cover Crops for Vegetable Gardens

2011-09-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

Oh, morning fresh and clear as heavenly light,
Like warmth of love within the unwilling breast,
Sad to be so possessed,
Always the delicate shafts, piercing and bright,
Troubling my rest.
…
But airy-light, and fragile, bitter sweet,
A small bell rings and all enchantment's done
In smallest intervals of expanding dawn;
But quiet fills the eyes, lightens the feet,
Dissolves the wonder, all fulfilled, complete.
Marya Zaturenska, Cold Morning Sky

Unlike Zaturenska, I’m not a morning person. I’m not much for late nights either. Not much troubles my rest these lengthening nights. Truth be told, I would call myself a noontime person, but the term “nooner” has some vaguely pornographic overtones. And speaking of porn, I learned something recently from Matt Smith (the best Dr. Who ever). He said everyone has a porn name - the pseudonym you would use if you became a porn star. It never occurred to me that we should all have a personal porn name. Here’s The Doctor’s advice.

Your porn name is made up of the name of your first pet, and the name of the first street you lived on. Imagine: Dusty River, or Lucky Harding, or Buddy High. Of course now days, this formula seems to be breaking down, and after careful consideration I blame two trends for this deterioration in porn naming convention. First of all, people seem to be naming their pets less cleverly. Second, is the sad trend of suburban developers to name streets with pretentions of bygone Olde England. I mean, how would you expect to make the big-time porn-wise if you were billed as Tiny Meadowbrook, or Sweetie Pie Golden Acres, or Angie Sherwood Forest.

Perhaps it’s the cool smell of autumn in the air. Perhaps it’s the more oblique slant of the light as the sun shifts itself southward in its daily path and deepens the shadows. Or perhaps it’s just that I haven’t been outdoors enough lately. Why I find myself thinking and writing about the deteriorating state of porn names, instead of putting my garden to rest is as much a mystery to me as figuring out the perfect seed mix for the winter cover crop for our Veggie Garden.

I want some legumes of course, like hairy vetch to fix nitrogen. But do I want only cold-hardy ones like hairy vetch, or can I select some of the more cold-sensitive species like cow peas since the garden lives in Zone 9? I confess that Sunn Hemp is a legume that calls to me, but maybe that’s just because of its slightly naughty name.

Then, I’ll want some grasses to germinate quickly and generate organic biomass to be tilled back in as green manure. But do I want to stick with boring winter rye or should I risk something more exciting like oats or barley or buckwheat that might self-sow if I don’t till it back in before it produces seed next spring?

And crimson or rose clover sounds pretty, but do I want to stay away from white clover because of the risk that it will produce so many volunteers? And what about our pestilent wildlife? Will the entire cover crop experiment merely provide forage for rabbits, rats and squirrels?

Better I just spend some time with that tempting second cup of coffee and sit outside and fill my eyes with quiet until the wonder dissolves and the answers come to me.

The Star that Comes at Summer's End

2011-09-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

“Old Priam first beheld him with his eyes

As, shining like a star, Achilles streaked across the plain,

The star that comes at summer’s end, its clear gleaming

In the milky murk of night displayed among the multitude ofstars

- the star theygive the name Orion’s Dog;

most radiant it is, but it makes an evil portent

and brings great feverish heat on pitiful mortal men…”

- Homer, Iliad,Carolyn Alexander, trans.

Autumn has found my backyard, and tortures the parchedgarden with overcast skies, cooler days, longer nights, but still no rain. The night sky however, even in lightpolluted suburbia, is beginning to take on the clarity I associate with coldwinter nights. I’ve been reading Carolyn Alexander’s book, The War that KilledAchilles, and find it engrossing and more than a little disturbingly apt in thetenth year of America’s foreign war in Afghanistan.

What we know as the Dog Star (in the constellation CanisMajor) is the brightest star in our night sky here in the northern hemisphere.The Greeks called this star Sirius, a word which means searing orscorching. What we see as as thedog star is actually two stars. (Now, you say: “Seriously?”, and I say,“Sirius-ly!” because it’s true.) Canis Major, and it’s companion constellationCanis Minor represent the two hunting dogs of Orion, and familiar Orion, withhis pointy sword and bow, is one of the constellations most people recognize.

According to this guy Sirus was “famed from times long past, the first glimpse ofSirius in dawn announced the rising of the Nile in ancient Egypt. (It no longerdoes because of precession,the 26,000-year wobble of the Earth's axis.)”

Sirus and Orion are harbingers of winter. As days shorten, they begin their nocturnal hunt later - after the sun sets. In summer, Orion andhis dogs cross the sky while the sun is above the horizon, and thus we can't see them in the sky until winter.

In the Iliad, scenes with Achilles are often filled withmetaphors about light, from dimly glowing to brightly searing. But unlikeallusions to light that modern readers might associate with good cheer or sunny dispositions,descriptions involving lightassociated with Achilles are often heavily weighted with ill omens and darkportents. Here’s my favorite example of that - a digression in the descriptionof Achilles donning his armor before he joins the battle in which he will slay Hecktor:

“He…caught up the great shield, huge and heavy

next, and from it the light glimmered far, as from the moon.

And as when from across water a light shines to mariners

From a blazing fire, when the fire is burning high in the mountains

In a desolate steading, as the mariners are carriedunwilling

By storm winds over the fish-swarming sea, far away fromtheir loved ones;

So the light from the fair elaborate shield of Achilles

Shot into the high air…”

I love the way this passage (Alexander quotes from Lattimore's translation) relentlessly focuses onincreasingly fearful detail. While at first the light reflected from his shieldseems to hint at good, but then we zoom into focus an image of storm-tossed sailors on a restless sea spotting a farawaysignal fire evokes the sort of grimness. The light, intended as a beacon ofhope and safety, becomes their final glimpse of unreachable safety upon a dry and distantmountain. The metaphor forces you to imagine that then the sea swallows them whole. This, to me, foreshadows the eventual fate of these soldiers.

While the star that comes at summer's end may refer to an evil omen when described by Homer, for me it will continue to signal the season of harvest and feasting. Unlike those sailors who were unable to avoid their cruel fate, my garden today seems to look forward to it's destiny and to a long cool rest. My backgard will begin to thrive again when the skies change to signal that Spring is coming.

Growing Old Disgracefully

2011-09-05T11:00:00.000-07:00

"Sun smudge on

the smoky water."

Archibald MacLeish, Autumn

Autumn is in theair, finally. Because the air is shifting more onshore, blowing the easternmetropolitan San Diego smog up against the mountains, I can see the smog trapped across the valley that is the eastern border of theEl Cajon valley. My front window faces north, looking down from halfway up theold mountains on the western side of the El Cajon valley. The valley slope ofthe northern side of the valley forms a cup, now half filed with brown fuzzy smog below. Above the skyline of these low mountains, is the clear blue skyhighlighted with brightly lit cumulus clouds that tantalize us with theirpromise of cooling rain on parched summer ground. I heard thunder rumble as Iwas making my morning coffee.

My small townorbits like a satellite a typical American city in SoCal. El Cajon is a formerfrontier town, one that ruthlessly vanquished the “primitive” natives barelythree generations ago. As the culture of our big city oozes out to us, we becomeanother cookie cutter suburb. This is the place where Tom Petty said there’s a freewayrunning through our yard. Ourpublic landscapes are designed mostly by gringos now.

Everywhere, thecrepe myrtle blossom effortlessly. I remember only the almost salmon red onesfrom my east coast childhood. Here and now, they seem mostly the softer andcleaner pink, delicate lace-white, and my favorite lavender ice.

Here and now,crepe myrtles come in two basic styles. First, are the rustic unpruned tallbushes with multiple graceful trunks tall open shrubs you see in peoples’yards.

The secondlandscape style could be called Early Twenty-first Century Urban Street IslandLow Bid. This version features slightly embarrassed and pretentious plantingsgrown into standards – single-trunked bushes striving to be tiny trees. Theyare all more-or-less pruned into bloated baloons and lowish lollipops that would offer scant shade to a goat.

Either way, their lovely trunks thrive in our auto-centric urban environment, bathed in smog and auto pollution. Crepe mytrle bark sloughs off in smooth strips leaving behind hundreds of shades of brown and grey in a changing mosaic pattern. The bark would make lovely paper.

These smallstandards are often alternated with bright pastel varieties of oleander - thatgo-to barrier strip bush that seemingly evolved to stop a crashing car going 65. Another companion planting are Natal Plum bushes, withstars of fragrant flowers winking whitely amid the shiny dark foliage. Theserigorously clipped hedges surround strip malls, seeming to try with their thorny limbsto contain the despair leaking out from the vacant storefronts.

Typically,within blocks of freeway exits, my neighborhood is still mostly suburbanroadside and choked drainage ditches beneath dry and crumbling banks andhillsides covered with flammable dead undergrowth. Here often grow ubiquitousnaked lady flowers who have, unfortunately, lost their virginal pink glow. They aregrowing old, and seriously, who wants to see their anorexic beauty that has witheredthem into naked old ladies.

Despite theseborderline relentless flowers, every small garden bush, summer annual, and mostof the background landscape seems to me to be accepting that it isn’t growinggracefully like grandma did. This isn’t where my grandmas lived and died.

The world haschanged around me. In the half-life of my time here in Zone 9, a mere 30 years,it has become hotter and drier. Even the allegedly low-water plants like Sonoran Desert natives andsimilar Mediterranean Climate plants (natives of west-facing coastal climatesin earth's plump midsection, like South Africa, South America and WesternAustralia) - all are fatigued having spent their summer energy. But all are still here. All of us seem to be entering late middle age and seem, in this dry autumn season before our rains begin, to be growing old disgracefully.

What Are Years

2011-08-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

By: Maianne Moore (1940)

What is our innocence,
what is our guilt? All are
naked, none is safe. And whence
is courage: the unanswered question,
the resolute doubt,——
dumbly calling, deafly listening——that
in misfortune, even death,
encourages others
and in its defeat, stirs

the soul to be strong? He
sees deep and is glad, who
accedes to mortality
and in his imprisonment rises
upon himself as
the sea in a chasm, struggling to be
free and unable to be,
in its surrendering
finds its continuing.

So he who strongly feels,
behaves. The very bird,
grown taller as he sings, steels
his form straight up. Though he is captive
his mighty singing
says, satisfaction is a lowly
thing, how pure a thing is joy.
This is mortality,
this is eternity.

Too Hot to Garden

2011-08-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

There once was a guy from Peru
Who had some growin’ up to do.
He’d ring my doorbell,
Then run like hell,
‘Til I nailed him with my old .22.
- Anonymous

Ever walk out to work in your garden, take one look around, and turn around and go back inside? That’s me and that’s today. It’s been hot and dry and I need to hand water. It’s too hot and sunny to water now though. The parched plants can’t believe their eyes when I ignore their silent withering looks and their wilted imploring leaves. Clutching my heart and dramatically promising I’ll be back later when it cools down, I calmly explain the sun will just fry them if I get their leaves wet now. I plead medical reasons. Their glaring silence reproaches me. Ok, then I plead laziness. You’re not the boss of me.

So, last week, after bringing the cardiologist my list of prescriptions and herbal supplements and having it be completely ignored, he proceeded to lecture me on taking my rat poison, excuse me, my warfarin. Two months in, I am still failing my INR lab tests that measure how fast my blood clots. Funny story. Turns out that the package inserts, legitimate medical websites and crazy conspiracy wack job bloggers are unanimous: Vitamin K and cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage promote good blood clotting. Too good, as it turns out for somebody who is at risk of becoming bedridden broccoli if a blood clot lodges in my brain. Such supplements and vitamins completely offset the blood thinning efforts of the rat poison. Which, it turns out, one of my supplements has 1000 IU of Vitamin K and another has vegetable extracts of broccoli and cabbage. After pointing this out on my medicines spreadsheet, he said: stop taking those supplements. Good to know.

So, if I knew this before he said so, why did I continue to take them despite the failure of every medical professional to tell me so? Because every medical professional told me not to significantly change my dietary and nutritional intake since my body had habituated to whatever I was taking, which they didn’t bother to determine when the information was literally handed to them on a single page with yellow highlighter. It's almost like I expected them to give me informed and correct medical advice or something.

So, today for the first time in two months, my INR has moved from .9 to 1.1, due entirely I am sure to the fact that I stopped the vitamin K and cruciferous vegetable extract supplements 4 days before yesterday's test. But when Coumadin Clinic Cindy called with yesterday’s INR results, and I started to say “Yay, that must be because…” She fucking interrupted me to say that score isn’t good and I should take a double dose tomorrow and test again next week. Shut up you idiot. I know more than you have bothered to glance at before lecturing me like I was 10! I don’t need this shit.

But then again, the garden didn’t offer much of a prospect for peaceful repose. So I’m inside thinking of other supplements that I should research. My medical care fails me now while I’m competent to notice and educate myself and learn what experts would do if they were paying attention. Heaven help me when I get dementia and I’m left to the mercy of these health care experts who don’t have the attention span to read more than the top line on a patient’s chart and ask you to repeat your name back to them like a secret password before they’ll say more than hello. That's what they consider taking a patient medical history.

Then again, it occurs to me that my generation of greedy rich Americans will have only ourselves to blame when we’re warehoused in Medicare nursing homes and eventually killed by medical neglect or mistreatment. We’re sending the next generation of doctors who will replace Coumadin Clinic Cindy to elementary school without lunches and dropping them out of high school for unemployment.

So, perhaps it’s another early happy hour in the air conditioning. I promise I’ll spend time outside once it cools off. Meanwhile, my kitty will have to sit on my lap for a half hour. That’s better than any Big Pharma and/or controlled substance for correcting my blood pressure after talking to Coumadin Clinic Cindy. Idiots.

BTW, I don't have a gun and can't throw a knife, but if you ring my doorbell and run away, I'll shake my fist and yell at you louder than Grandpa Simpson.

My My, Hey Hey

2011-08-14T11:39:00.001-07:00

“My my, hey hey. Rock and roll is here to stay... It's better to burn out than to rust.”
Neil Young, My My, Hey Hey Hey

If you’ve ever considered murder – or as I prefer to call it, third party assisted suicide – you have probably considered the antifreeze appletini. The color is genuine, the taste is divine, and the result is (one must assume) gratifying. Disclaimer: I wouldn’t know. As anybody knows who has ever watched any episode of CSI, the active ingredient in antifreeze is propylene glycol, and enough of it will kill you. (I can’t google specific doses/outcomes or it will leave an Internet history trail on my home computer that I’d prefer not to create.) According to the Internet, this organic compound is used in degreasers, wallpaper strippers, antifreeze, and strangely also in baby powder, shampoo and skin cream. Go figure.

So, on a seemingly unrelated topic, I’ve been trying to get Tech Support Guy to hydrate more. He’s not a fan of appletinis just so you know. He’s apparently also allergic to water. He used to drink diet soda by the liter, until his doctors explained that this leaches calcium out of your bones, and by middle age he had the bones of a ninety-year-old female anorexic meth addict. So, he pretty much sticks to cheap wine and coffee, both of which I have explained using small words, are diuretics. Which means they pretty much do the opposite of hydrate you.

Well then, he’s recently seen this amazing new product advertised on the TV. They’ve patented something I discovered years ago. You can add a tiny bit of fruit juice or red wine to a glass of cold water and you get a pretty and mildly flavored beverage that will in fact hydrate you without rotting your teeth or making you drunk. So TCG gets some of this new stuff. It colors and flavors water like my invention only with a lovely (not!) diet sweetener finish that makes my teeth itch.

Imagine my surprise when I looked at the ingredients. WTF? Have I discovered a replacement for the antifreeze appletini? I suppose the advantage to this stuff is that your guts won't rust.

From Wisdom to Madness Via Woe

2011-08-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

"Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness."
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Trying to educate myself about my new irregular heartbeat and deadening drug side-effects has been like giving myself up to fire. I’ve had irregular heartbeats intermittently (no, that’s not redundant) for a few weeks. When I finally got to the doctor last week, he blew off my list of side effects from the rat poison and the antiarrhythmic saying I’d had a life-changing experience, so some disruption in mood was to be expected. Which did nothing to make me wiser and a lot to make me madder.

My side effects include menopausal hot flashes that leave me drenched in sweat, itching skin that seems to move around my arms and legs like ants when I try to sleep, mood swings that make menopause look like a slightly cloudy afternoon (no that’s not redundant either), unprovoked crying, feeling totally overwhelmed at the least little problem, and headaches. He increased one of my prescriptions because my blood pressure is also elevated. All doctors do these days is practice medicine with prescription pads - meaning he paid attention to the one symptom a prescription pad purports to cure (without consideration of what new side-effects it might cause). When I drop something on the floor, instead of cleaning it up, I just say fuck this and walk away. I’ve pretty much lost interest in everything except my favorite kitty. So I suppose that’s a good sign – the kitty part, not the other stuff.

The backyard has defeated me. I now consider myself a lapsed gardener. The neglected table-top miniature pots with moss in them have now succumbed to high heat and a shut-off sprinkler. They were to give me something cool and calm to meditate on. I plan to go outside to see what stage of slow and gruesome death by lack of hydration they are in as soon as I finish my caffeine-free coffee that tastes like worn-out socks. I’ve also vitrually stopped drinking alcohol too, which hasn’t exactly contributed positively to my outlook.

Despite its failure to operate as a quilting machine, my new sewing machine works quite well as a sewing machine, so that’s a ray of frickin’ sunshine in my currently dismal life. To restore the balance to the universe, I made pillow cases for TCG’s two tiny pillows and embroidered the following rhyme on one: Goodnight my dear,/ And sweet repose./ Lie on your back/ So you don’t squish your nose.

I did a lot of medical research on line, being careful to distinguish between batshit crazy wacko sites and, say, Mayo Clinic and NIH.gov, a process which involves a minimum of a third grade education and the application of judgment which, surprisingly, doctors seem to think those without a postgraduate degree in some biological science are incapable of exercising. Turns out the cute ER doc who mentioned that cannabis use is linked to tachycardia might have been right. I say might, because he fact that the relevant research was conducted on healthy 20-something men and involved only smoking (rather than oral ingestion of) marijuana may not be significant, and wasn't terribly specific about dosing. Now because I lack a medical-related degree I might just be blowing smoke here, metaphorically speaking, of course. I’m refraining from my go-to herbal cure for depression at least until I finish adapting to the rat poison and apparently non-functioning shit that’s supposed to regulate my heart. I may or may not bother to see the cardiologist. At this point in my research, I’m leaning to getting some blood tests for cardiac blood markers like C-reactive protein and other inflammatory cytokines like Tumor Necrosis Factors that are better indications of stroke risk, but what do I know.

WRT the non-functioning antiarrhythmia med, called Amioderone, I found a study (could only access the abstract) that said: “The management of AF (atrial fibrillation – what I had) can vary among individuals depending on factors such as underlying heart condition, age, stroke risk, and the severity of symptoms associated with AF. The Atrial Fibrillation Follow-up Investigation of Rhythm Management (AFFIRM) trial randomized AF patients into 2 treatment strategies: heart rate control without attempting to maintain normal rhythm versus heart-rhythm control that attempted to maintain normal rhythm through the use of medications. Both groups received warfarin (aka, rat poison). The study showed that there was no advantage of one approach over the other in terms of survival. Patients treated with heart rhythm medications were hospitalized more often for their treatment and were exposed to possible side effects of antiarrhythmic medications. Therefore, the selection of treatment strategy is often guided by symptoms. Anticoagulation should be considered for all patients at increased risk for stroke” (Chung MK. Vitamins, supplements, herbal medicines, and arrhythmias. Cardiol Rev. 2004 Mar;12(2):73–8).

Now, as an uneducated drug-addled old broad, I read that as saying the Amioderone was more trouble than it was worth. My doc read that part of the 9-page research paper I compiled in doing my research, and shook his head patronizingly and said “You should ask your cardiologist about that”. So, should I survive the questionable care of these distracted mechanics, I might do that. Funny story about the side effects of Amioderone: “Though this medication often gives great benefits to people with irregular heartbeat, it may infrequently worsen an irregular heartbeat or cause serious (sometimes fatal) side effects.” I’m pretty sure death is a “fatal side effect” but I’ll have to ask my cardiologist to be sure.

So Much For Docile Earth

2011-08-05T11:31:00.000-07:00

"Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!"
Herman Melville, Moby Dick

So, I haven’t been to my own Tahiti in the backyard for a while - or to this blog - because I encountered my own white whale in the middle of July. Following a day working outside, I began to feel the horrors of the half known life: the now-familiar racing heartbeat I recognize as atrial fibrillation.

I had spent the third day in a row outside, cleaning up the backyard after the guys put down dg rock where nothing will grow. I moved flower pots, chairs etc and generally rearranged the furniture. I had everything swept and tidy and spent the last hour watering and generally appreciating how lovely everything looks. I take great satisfaction, and Ireceive great peace when my work in the yard is complete. The best part of the day is hand watering and then sitting still to enjoy the fruits of what I considered healthy exercise and hard work. So much for that little theory. I had experienced irregular cardiac symptoms over the past few days and chose to ignore them: when I felt funny heartbeats, I'd stop and sit still for a while until things settled down. Apparently, you shouldn’t do that, despite the fact that I felt ok at the time.

I had some left over dinner while talking to my sister on the phone for a good half hour. I then hit the shower, which is where the unannounced and uncontrollable heart racing began. My pulse went up to 155 over the next hour, and included what the doc calls "palpitations". That word conjures an image of an old lady wearing a flower-print dress with a lace collar, sitting in an overstuffed chair fanning herself with a hankie and complaining of having the vapors. The actual medical term is premature ventricle contractions. To me, it was the kind of pounding and thumping that you can feel in your chest after running too fast too long, but it was irregular and jumpy. I took a few atenelols and tried to get some cat purring therapy, but Lily wasn't particularly interested in rocking quietly on my shoulder, the ungrateful little bitch. At least, I didn't hyperventilate and/or panic like I did when this happened on my birthday a few months ago. So, Tech Support Guy and I decided it was time to avail myself of the health care system’s benefits. Being concerned about hurting delicate feelings, not to mention incurring legal liability, let’s just say my health care system’s name rhymes with Geyser Vermin and Tea, or GVT for short, and the names below have been changed.

So, we drove to the ER, taking it easy on surface streets. TSG had discovered a flat tire on trying to go to the grocery earlier in the day. At least AAA had already been out to change the tire, but we were using the little toy spare tire and didn't want to take the freeway. This time, we didn't snark at each other out of misplaced panic like we did on the ER run a couple of months ago, and by now, the palpitations had stopped. My heart was still racing, but it seemed to be smoother, and we took that as a good sign.

I got right in at the ER by sitting down and calmly explaining I was in a-fib and presenting a list of blood pressure and heart rates and times and meds taken in the prior hour. So far, this was pretty much like before. The difference began when they gave me the first IV med and it didn't stop the a-fib in its tracks. Watching this on a hospital monitor is very instructive. I am convinced I should be able to do some biofeedback and make it smooth out, but no such luck. The pulse rate actually went down to the 100-120 range thanx to the meds, but the distances between the tall upward pointy spikes in the heartbeat continued to be unevenly spaced, and that's what is called atrial fibrillation. By now, it's about 20:00 and we are not amused.

It took about 6 hours and several variations on type of med and type of delivery before my heartbeat settled back into what they call normal sinus rhythm. By now, they were insisting I had to be admitted - something we were both determined to avoid. This isn't out of some misplaced idea that I'm a superhero. It's because the ER is a very loud and stressful place, and the last time I spent the night in the hospital I brought home some bad bug and mother ended up in a rehab facility, and I just wanted to go home to sleep in my own bed. It took until 3:00 am before the very busy ER admitting doc got to us. He not only looked at me instead of the monitor when he spoke, he assumed I had a functioning brain. He also said I should stick around and he could get me a quiet room. So TCG drove home slowly and texted me on his safe arrival (on the toy tire) and said he got to bed at 4 and later said that he got to sleep at 5. I finally got to a room at 5:30 but this talkative nurse kept me up until 6:30 doing her on-line questionnaire (Do you feel safe at home? Do you want to see a Chaplin? I know, but we have to ask this etc.). I finally told her I was exhausted and to leave me alone and fell asleep promptly until awoken exactly one hour later for more shit like getting my temp taken and my IV untangled and making sure I turned over so I wouldn't get bedsores ("I know, but we have to do this" - apparently even if the patient dies from sleep deprivation). As I once again realized, I'm not at my best when cranky and nap-deprived.

By 10:30 the next morning I was off the IV and my heartbeat was regular. I was seen by two shifts of nurses, including 2 more shift supervisors, a dietician wanting to know what I wanted for dinner, an attending doc, a cardiologist, a pharmacist and at least 4 other people who went over several variations of my prescription drugs (though curiously, all reading presumably the same online version of my file) and I think either Zombie Mother Teresa or a homeless bag lady with a hospital ID she stole from a nurse who must have caught her going through the hazardous waste trash looking for syringes and who she had to shank. Pretty sure that's what happened. I had breakfast (that sat there for 2 hours while I tried to nap in between visits from people who didn't realize I wasn't wearing my hearing aids and that I was faking understanding them just to get them to leave me alone). I had lunch. I finally got to pee all by myself. BTW, did you know that when you get several gallons of saline intravenously with a tiny bit of drugs, it goes directly to your bladder? Someday, you'll thank me for this important information. It's apparently something completely unknown to professional medical people.

I finally got discharged at 3:00 just when Nurse Betty promised me she'd let me out. We stopped to pick up my new drugs, and listen to the bored pharmacist read from the pile of papers in front of me and tell me not to be worried by all the DIRE WARNINGS IN CAPITAL LETTERS sprinkled through the quarter-ream of package inserts. The ER Admitting doc mentioned that one of my new prescriptions (Coumadin/warfarin) actually includes an anticoagulant ingredient used in rat poison. Ahh, the miracles of modern chemistry never start to cease to amaze me.

The scariest part of this particular episode was about midnight when nothing would make the a-fib stop and some idiot who took a chest x-ray explained that he was a medic in Iraq and my ER nurse, Heather, (who was about 16 and very competent and nice) was new and he knew this because she didn't want to let people die who were going to die anyway but tried to save them when she should move on to other patients who might actually not die. Upon completion of the x-ray he said: I hope I didn't scare you. The douche.

Real and Imagined Official State Stuff

2011-07-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”
T. S. Eliot

Like most states, California has a state flag, and a state animal (California grizzly bear, aka Ursus californicus) and a state flower (Eschsholtzia california, or California poppy). Here’s a fun fact not know to many people outside The Inland Empire: April 6 is California Poppy Day, which Californians celebrate by eating lemon poppy seed muffins instead of our usual granola bar.

But wait, there’s more. Because we weren’t satisfied to have merely a flower, in 2004, we selected a state grass. Now, you might think that would be Cannabis sativa, but you’d be wrong. It’s Nassella pulchra or purple needlegrass. Once established, Purple needlegrass is tolerant of summer drought and heat, and a single plant can live more than 150 years, which I’m sure was the deciding factor in picking purple needlegrass over common spurge which, in my yard at least, is as immortal as the legendary phoenix. And of course we have a state motto: Eureka! I’m not positive, but I think we’re the only state who’s motto includes an exclamation point!

California legislators, when not engaged in budget talks or passing substantive legislation, find the time to designate stuff as our official state things. For example, we've had a state fossil (Smilodon californicus, aka, saber-toothed cat), since 1973, by which time I’m pretty sure they were extinct so we could safely designate them as state fossils instead of, say, state park mascots. Not only that, we have a state prehistoric artifact. It happens to be a small chipped stone bear, discovered at an archaeological dig site in San Diego County in 1985, a fact that, since we learned of this in 2011, has made San Diegans very proud.

Some of California’s things aren’t very dignified. Our state insect is the California dogface butterfly or dog head (Zerene eurydice). And while I bet other states’ insects can kick our insect’s butt, but keep in mind our state animal could probably kill and eat yours for brunch (which happens to be our official state meal between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM).

Other official California stuff is just as lame. We have a state soil. Seriously. “The San Joaquin Soil was designated as the official state soil in 1997. The designation commemorates the completion of the state's most comprehensive soil inventory and acknowledges the importance of soil.” Also, being more like compacted clay, a handful of our official state soil will not include fear. All this official stuff I didn’t make up can be found Here.

California is also the first state to have an official state recipe (organic hash brownies, of course), bedroom slipper, (Grandpa Simpson’s footwear), addictive prescription drug, overused cliché, and Starbucks coffee drink. Don’t be surprised if you can’t find these official things on the website. Some of our stuff is password protected and can only be revealed to people who know our official state secret handshake.

But what are we waiting for? Recently some states like Arizona (the Kentucky of the Southwest) have designated official state guns. I wish I was kidding. So, starting today, I'm accepting nominations to a Special Commission that will identify an official California recreational substance, double murder, embroidery stitch, existensial quandry, profane insult, yoga position, processed meat product, outpatient medical procedure, preferred homeless residence, parody motto, excuse for being late, most bitter regret, and favorite method of suicide. The sooner the better, since at this very moment, Arizona is working on an official public official fall from grace, wet t-shirt contest, misuse of a common kitchen utensil (but, being Arizona, they have yet to designate an official common kitchen utensil), auto GPS voice (Elmer Fudd is on the short list) laundry sorting method, texting shorthand, and victimless crime.

All in War with Time

2011-07-01T11:26:00.000-07:00

When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and cheque'd even by the self-same sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory;
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay,
To change your day of youth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
- William Shakespeare, Sonnet XV

We finally put netting over the stonefruit tree in the Veggie Garden, but by the time we got to it, all the fruits pictured were pecked to death. While we can't exactly engraft the fruit new, we at least managed to protect a handful of fuzzy peaches.

This tree is a healthy rootstock with three different fruits grafted on top. We've seen peaches every few years, particularly when harvest is preceeded by a hard winter frost (rare). We once saw nectarines. But the third branch, possibly an apricot, has never borne fruit. The lesson here seems to be if you want three kinds of stonefruit, plant three trees. The strongest seems to starve out the weaker grafts. The birds, or squirrels or whoever is taking the peaches the minute they ripen, bothers only to taste a bite and wastes the rest of the hard unripe fruit. Nature can be kind of a dick sometimes.

Kute Korrespondences

2011-06-23T11:38:00.000-07:00

"The rest of us, not chosen for enlightenment, left on the outside of Earth, at the mercy of a Gravity we have only begun to learn how to detect and measure, must go on blundering inside our front-brain faith in Kute Korrespondences, hoping that for each psi-synthetic taken from Earth's soul there is a molecule, secular, more or less ordinary and named, over here - kicking endlessly among the plastic trivia, finding in each Deeper Significance and trying to string them all together like terms of a power series hoping to zero in on the tremendous and secret Function whose name, like the permuted names of God, cannot be spoken... plastic saxophone reed sounds of unnatural timbre, shampoo bottle ego-image, Cracker Jack prize one-shot amusement, home appliance casing fairing for winds of cognition, baby bottles tranquilization, meat packages disguise of slaughter, dry-cleaning bags infant strangulation, garden hoses feeding endlessly the desert... but to bring them together, in their slick persistence and our preterition... to make sense out of, to find the meanest sharp sliver of truth in so much replication, so much waste..."
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Lately, I think I’m suffering from early stage Michele Bachmann – having difficulty distinguishing the neurological sparks of exploding tiny cerebral embolisms from coded messages from god.

A mild-mannered gardener by day, at night I dress up like a colorblind ladybug and fight crime, or - depending on the TV Guide and the police scanner - I watch 70s sitcom reruns on basic cable. I also meticulously alter my daily routines so that I don’t fall into patterns that my enemies might study in order to defeat me. I never shower at the same time twice, say, or eat a liverwurst sandwich for lunch two days in a row.

And speaking of sandwiches, I’m as American as a grilled cheese sandwich made out of Wonder Bred (sic) and those suspiciously orange slices individually wrapped in plastic (but with the plastic removed before grilling). If we simply toast our bread and then slap some cheese in the middle, the terrorists have already won and destroyed our American lifestyle options. Next stop: Sharia law that denies women access to healthcare and stones the gays.

But back to my mental status. Lately, I’ve been saying “bollocks” instead of bullshit when the evening news is on the tv. As we all know, bullshit (or as they say on the other side of the pond, bollocks) describes the content of what you say when you don’t know or care whether what you say is true or not. To lie assumes you know what the real truth is. To bullshit is to not care one way or the other. Most of the talking heads on evening news seem increasingly to have dispensed with mere lies and drifted into pure bullshit.

I conclude from my increasing dependence on bloody British expressions of displeasure, that one of three things has happened. One, god is trying to tell me something. B) I’m listening to too much BBC America. Third, of course, I’m batshit crazy after all.

If it’s god, then I conclude he’s is telling me to expand my cursing horizons and embrace a more international lexicon of profanity; to mix up my speech patterns the same way I mix up my daily routine to foil evil villains.
If it’s not god, then the Beeb could be sending me subliminal auditory messages that somehow American censors don’t get and thus don’t bleep. The Beeb is agreeing that the evening television news is rubbish. See? There I go again.

And if I’m simply crazy, well then, at least I have the imagination to enjoy it by making cool Brit profanity my own and not boring myself by shouting the same old cute bullshit back at my television, while continuing to sift through the waste for the meanest sharp sliver of truth.

To Quilt or Not to Quilt

2011-06-11T10:49:00.001-07:00

God in His infinite wisdom  
Did not make me very wise-  
So when my actions are stupid  
They hardly take God by surprise
Langston Hughes, Acceptance

I’ve been trying to quilt a lovely quilt using my lovely pre-owned sewing/embroidery machine. It’s king-sized, so it’s humungous and thus heavy. I’m trying to use a pre-programmed quilting pattern of lovely swirls and circles. I am experience a performance level somewhere between that of beginning second-grader and a coma patient. I’m about ready to tie the quilt to a sledge, lug it up to the top of the highest mountain I can see, (not counting the mountains to the south which are actually in Mexico - because my quilt doesn’t have a passport), tie the quilt to an altar and burn the fucking thing as an offer to the quilting gods whom I have apparently, unintentionally, and thoroughly offended.

To be fair, I’m using 2-ply embroidery thread to do this instead of heavier 3-ply quilting thread made for the express purpose of sewing quilting blocks. Also, I’m not attempting to quilt tiny blocks which I would then assemble into a big quilt. Instead, I’ve sewn the blocks into a single quilt and pinned the lining and back into a largish quilt sandwich. This means I’m trying to place the quilt into an embroidery frame, hook the frame to the embroidery arm, and then lift and move the gobs of awkward quilt sandwich in sync with the moving frame so that the motor won’t overheat trying to move frame in tiny circles and swirls as it follows the quilting pattern.

Also, I’ve refused to attend any of the instructional classes offered by local fabric and/or sewing machine vendors because the people who attend them wear clothing covered in cat hair and loose threads, and talk about their grandchildren and what they are going to eat next, and I have not quite sunk to that level. So the learning curve on my actual use of the machine to sew quilt patterns is steeper than the broad side of a barn. M’kay?

Still, why should my ability to quilt be based on such objective facts as my ignorance and use of the wrong thread? My quilting ability should not be subject to such banal reality, any more than it should be subject to the vagaries of fortune, the whims of fate, or the ply of my thread. Based on my extremely high degree of natural beauty, my expectation of exceptional levels of accomplishment consistent with my desires and presumed intelligence, my natural entitlement to the best the universe has to offer, my subtle but innovative sense of personal style, and my compliance with most of the provisions of the Patriot Act, I should possess mad quilting skilz by now.

Instead, I find the present state of affairs quiltingwise to be unacceptable. This too should hardly take the quilting gods by surprise.

Swing and A Miss

2011-06-09T11:19:00.000-07:00

“It can’t be OK if you have 30 marijuana cigarettes and bad if you have 50 marijuana cigarettes. It's either bad or it's not bad."
Themis Klarides, Republican Connecticut Congresswoman, Connecticut To Decriminalize Marijuana

Dear Congresswoman Klarides:

Another way of saying what you said above is to put it into an if/then conditional statement. You said if a lot is bad, then a little is bad. If X, then Y. Two problems here.

First, the proposed provision of the law about the illegality of marijuana depending upon the quantity is not an if/then conditional statement in the first place. Nobody said it is true that if a lot is bad/illegal, then a little is bad/illegal (If Y then X). So the truth of your attempted converse (If X then Y) is irrelevant.

The proposed law is a single proposition (a little is not bad/illegal) followed by a qualifying “however” proposition (a lot is bad/illegal). What you did was attempt to rebut a non-existent proposition.

Second, even if we skip the straw man argument your sound bite cleverly blows to smithereens, and for the sake of argument, we assume the law is in fact stating the nonsense proposition that if a little marijuana is bad/legal, then a lot is not bad/illegal, there is still a problem with your logic.

Sometimes, the converse of a true proposition is true. Some things are bad regardless of quantity. For example, we probably both agree on the proposition that that if a single murder is bad, then so is a mass murder. If X, then Y. The converse of this proposition is also true: if a lot of killings are bad, then so is one (if Y, then X).

Sometimes however, the converse of an if/then statement isn’t true. For example, let’s agree that moderate cleanliness is next to godliness. It does not follow that a lot of cleanliness is more divine. Obsessively and compulsively washing one’s hands is not godlike; it’s a recognized mental disorder. Another example: eating one gummy bear might be good, but putting an entire handful into your mouth at once and masticating them into an oral mass grave is not so good.

A final example might make this point with clarity that even you can grasp: If you use marijuana, then you will die. Since we will all die, this is true. However, the converse is probably not so true: everyone who dies used marijuana. That’s as stupid as proposing that since everyone who said prayers in school will die, then school prayer will kill you. Stupid, right?

With all due respect Congresswoman Klrides, your statement is stupid.

Exploded Dreams

2011-06-06T10:48:00.000-07:00

When younger," said he, "I believed myself destined for some great enterprise. My feelings are profound; but I possessed a coolness of judgment that fitted me for illustrious achievements. This sentiment of the worth of my nature supported me when others would have been oppressed; for I deemed it criminal to throw away in useless grief those talents that might be useful to my fellow-creatures. When I reflected on the work I had completed, no less a one than the creation of a sensitive and rational animal, I could not rank myself with the herd of common projectors…. My imagination was vivid, yet my powers of analysis and application were intense… My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred it did not endure the violence of the change without tone such as you cannot even imagine.
- Mary Shelly, Frankenstein

Langston Hughes once pondered what happened to dreams when they were “deferred”. That’s a nice way of saying when they don’t come true. Rather than the artful raisin in the sun, I like the last line of his poem when he posits that such deferred dreams might just explode.

One fortunate consequence of losing one’s mind with age is that the dreams of youth fade too. So, it’s not like I mourn all the childish dreams that shriveled and dried up. It’s more like I don’t remember them, and thus they don’t sting.

It's more like there’s this empty shelf in the increasingly dusty and disordered cupboard of my mind where the dreams must have once resided. There’s a button, a dessicated and now colorless flower, a mysterious key to some forgotten lock, a pretty rock, a small picture of Dopey, and some blue lint. Luckily, I am educated enough that I still recognize the astonishing breadth of my ignorance; and more fortunate still that I no longer have sufficient imagination to be frightened by the unknown.

The dreams of my youth didn’t so much explode as fizzle. I don't think I was destined for illustrious achievements. I didn’t discover some unknown land, or write a book or stop a war. I didn't posess a sentiment of the worth of nature to support me in tough times. Then again, my sensitive little heart didn't get unimaginably wrenched by misery.

I did forgive instead of holding hate. I learned how to cook. I learned that I like cats. I read of few books and understood fewer.

I loved my family, and knew love in return. I made a garden. I am satisfied.

Retirement = Good

2011-06-03T15:21:00.001-07:00

"I'll tell thee everything I can;  There's little to relate. 
I saw an aged aged man, 
A-sitting on a gate. 
"Who are you, aged man?' I said. 
"and how is it you live?" 
And his answer trickled through my head 
Like water through a sieve.

He said "I look for butterflies 
That sleep among the wheat: 
I make them into mutton-pies, 
And sell them in the street. 
I sell them unto men,' he said, 
"Who sail on stormy seas; 
And that's the way I get my bread -- 
A trifle, if you pleae."

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Now, maybe if my job description were the second verse above, I’d aspire to love my work.

Butterflies? Check

Sleeping? Check.

Yummy pie-making? Check.

Ability to let thoughts trickle through the head like water through a sieve? O hell yes, check.

A trifle, if you please.

The Sense of Smell

2011-05-31T12:07:00.000-07:00

"At four in the morning, in summertime, 
Love's drowsiness still lasts... 
The bushes blow away the odor 
Of the night's feast."
Rimbaud, Alchemy of the Word

They say blind people can hear better than sighted people, or if not better, they can focus and understand what they’re hearing better. So, when I started to lose my hearing, I figured I was going to be compensated by a gradual ramping up of my sight: perhaps into galactically hallucinatory levels. Instead, I can’t see to thread a needle any more.

I was compensated however by developing hyper smell. It’s like a radioactive anteater bit me. (I say anteater because they have this long snout, so it’s like they must be able to smell ants at 100 anteater paces.) Unlike my mediocre gardening skills, my mad sense of smell could beat up my mother’s sense of smell.

During those lately fleeting moments of consciousness, it never starts to amaze me when information is conveyed to my brain by my senses of smell: like having a conversation without words.

My unasked for superpower is a mixed blessing, which I guess is pretty typical of superpowers. My flights of olfactory abandon take me to the fathomless deep space of the atom, with electrons spinning around it to make the logo of the old Disneyland’s old Tomorrowland. (Kind of funny how Walt got that wrong. Instead of flying around in our jetpacks or sliding along a motorized walkway, we’re texting our Swiss bankers for account updates via the cloud.)

So instead of offsetting my superpower like I would have in my younger days - by buying stuff I don’t need to comfort me – I am trying to use my super powers only for good, by planting a garden for smelling. You can buy stuff to please your eye. You can work with the Internet to find music that only you can appreciate deep within your genome. (You know, like how some song lyrics seem to be a confidential message addressed to you alone in the world. If that were so, the soundtrack to today would be the lyrics to the song Mahna, Mahna, Mahna, but that’s for another post.) But you can’t easily surround yourself with good smells. I don’t count the entire aisle of the supermarket that is filled with multitudes of “air fresheners” that purport to bathe your rooms in aromas of mountain glens, freshly cleaned laundry, or cinnabuns.

This morning I took a walk through the backyard still fresh from a day of soft overnight rain, and I smelled the flowers. I mean I really smelled the flowers.

There was the white rose, moments away from burning out in a solar flare of blown rose: full, filled with dew. It exuded a scent of melting mountain snow and with faint finish of charcoal fire, and the damp whiff of high thread count cotton.

To me, there is a world of difference between the honest essential oil fragrance of say, lavender, and the oily chemical lavender with an undertone of burnt toast. All floral and herbal smells are like that to me. Only the genuine essential oil smell pleases my nose; never the synthetic poser fragrances that always leave an olfactory aftertaste of petroleum products and wet cardboard.

The blue flower spikes on the white sage, smell somehow like green tea, with a tincture of sweet sage and a pinch of the honey from of adjacent sweet white alyssum. The heavy dew doesn’t just wake up these smells, it kicks them out of bed and onto the floor, tangled up in a pile of sheets.

The flowering ornamental quince flowers don’t seem to have a fragrance so much as they seem to wear an olfactory trench coat that permits only a faint trace of scent to escape - like something you can remember so clearly you can almost smell it - a lingering smell that combines night-blooming jasmine and spicy lemon verbena, combined with an earthy smell something like ripe blue cheese.

I don’t generally garden with flowers, preferring the scented herbs and other fragrant plants. I have a lemon area that includes lemongrass and a lemony vetiver grass, lemon verbena, lemon thyme and, of course, a dwarf Meyer lemon variety that might actually produce lemons this year. A trip through my yard before the morning dew evaporates is an olfactory delight.

Happy Memorial Day

2011-05-28T10:25:00.000-07:00

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate…we cannot consecrate…we cannot hallow…this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg, PA, November 19, 1863

Possible Evidence of Insanity/Eggnog Recipe

2011-05-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

"I felt despair. Though it seems to me now there's two kinds of it: the sort that causes a person to surrender and then the sort I had which made me take risks and make plans."
Erica Eisdorfer, The Wet Nurse's Tale

For some time now, I’ve been thinking of re-naming this blog: “Notes to Self” and with a subtitle: Looking for a foolproof plan and an airtight alibi. My idea is to post tips that I come across for committing the perfect crime. There are several problems with this.

The first and more obvious problem is that in the event I ever stumbled on the details of a perfect crime, some clever detective might track down the blog and it would be submitted as evidence of premeditation. So you see my dilemma.

The second problem is that I have not come up with very many ideas. Accordingly, I have graciously decided to share the few tips I have unearthed with the entire internets. By disclosing these ideas I have implicitly decided never to use them. Well, now, explicitly.

1. Arsenic poising wasn’t testable until the Marsh test in 1836. Thus, it is now too late to use this colorless, tasteless poison and remain undetected these days. If you have a time machine, you might want to consider transporting you and your intended victim back before 1836. On the other hand, you might simply go back and dispose of this Marsh fellow before he comes up with the test.

2. Don’t just wipe the pistol clean of fingerprints: remember to wipe prints off the bullets.

3. The lethal dose of nutmeg is 5 grams. Disclaimer: I’m not sure if this is true, not to mention whether subsequent tests would indicate nutmeg poisoning. I can’t remember whether I got this info from the google or whether it came to me in a dream. If I were going to use nutmeg (which, of course, I’m not) I’d offer it to my intended victim(s) as Killer Eggnog, and put in enough Southern Comfort to mask the nutmeg, i.e. a lot.

BTW, always use Southern Comfort instead of rum to make your eggnog. See, even if you don’t contemplate criminal activity, you now know my Daddy’s secret to good eggnog.

You can thank me later.

Journal of a Disappointed Gardener

2011-04-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill...:
W. N. P. Barbellion, The Journal of a Disappointed Man

...Nor yet is the last Cheeto found beneath the cushions; neither yet is a humane and peaceful death to those whose stupidity should have led to their timely death years ago; nor yet is wisdom to those who actually think before speaking; neither yet is experience required to be a suicide bomber; nor yet irony to those most in need of irony's balm; nor yet is ottava rima simply a poem in eight 11-syllable lines, rhymed: abababcc.

Nor finally, is the race to the swift. It's actually a crap shoot, and it goes to whoever remains upright and staggers across the finish line.

Short Vacation to Northern California

2011-04-20T16:37:00.000-07:00

Well, I've seen all there is to see
And I've heard all they have to say
I've done everything I wanted to do . . .
I've done that too
And it ain't that pretty at all
Ain't that pretty at all
So I'm going to hurl myself against the wall
'Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all

You know, I just had a short vacation, Roy
Spent it getting a root canal
"Oh, how'd you like it?"
Well, it ain't that pretty at all
So I'm going to hurl myself against the wall
'Cause I'd rather feel bad than not feel anything at all
- Warren Zevon, It Ain't Pretty At All

Actually, it was pretty. Much better than a root canal. We ate some world class food, and we drank as we generally do, also world class. Stayed in Berkeley, but spent a day or two across the bay in San Francisco.

We did the usual stuff. Drove past Fisherman's Wharf (you don't want to stop there.) You can see our car reflected in the window of the store selling fake crap, priced like the real thing.

We drove up and down hills. Between us, I worried about an earthquake and all the live electrical wires falling on me. One of the reasons for the world class drinking was to assuage my fears.

We drive by the Alcoa Building, which hasn't been called the Alcoa Building since before the end of the last century, but it's hard enough to remember old stuff without having to re-learn it.

We went to Magnolia brewpub, despite the dramatic foreshadowing of the politics we'd encounter there.

The place is pretty shabby and tarnished. I got some awesome socks that look like a shark, complete with a tiny fin. So when you wear them, it looks like your feet have been swallowed by a shark, albeit one with a very orthopedic shape.

Why anyone would want to live in such close proximity to so many other people escapes me. Sure, there's a great food and drink scene and lots of pretty places to see, but the earthquake, people!

And does your laundry really smell fresh when you dry it outdoors this way? Maybe it's hip to smell like car and bus exhaust, and I'm just showing how out of touch I am. Still.

After driving up the inland route, we decided to take the coast (more or less) home. At first it was pretty foggy and only the seagulls knew which way the ocean was.

After driving north through the inland valley of California, breathing delightful dust from freshly fertilized fields and passing cattle feed lots, the ocean was a lovely sight, even in fog.Our return trip coincided with Earth Day, and we had good reason to enjoy the earth.
The further south we got, the more sun peeked through. We were travelling east as much as we were travelling south because of the way CA curves. Or maybe like a shark sock on a foot.

We drove past fields of artichokes ready to harvest and through Castro CA, the "artichoke capital of the world". One of the few remaining sights along a road blighted by rich piles of McMansions and vanity vineyards was the giant artichoke. Or should I say, the GIANT ARTICHOKE. A bit anticlimac after the signs, but still.

Stopped at twilight for dinner in Santa Barbara, unoficially at the southern border of NorCal. Next stop, SoCal and the not-so-scenic megalopolis of Los Angeles. By then, we hopped on the 405 to the Five and home by 10:30 in time for a nightcap and glorious return to our own bed.

With apologies to Warren Zevon, no need to hurl ourselves against a wall this trip. We had a wonderful vacation and visit, and most of all we had lots to celebrate. Thanks to our hosts, the Doctors K for a great time.

Glasses Half Occupied

2011-04-06T11:45:00.000-07:00

"In the hinterlands of Pommerania, there is a mountain made of the hardest diamond. It's one hour deep into the earth, one hour up toward the sky, one hour long and one hour wide. To this mountain comes a little bird, once every hundred years, to sharpen its beak. And when this bird has worn away the whole mountain, the first second of eternity has passed."
Article Source

I shall now recount the tale of my adventures, beginning with my abounding optimism that when my wisteria bloom, all is right with the world.

In my younger days, this season might have found me in a coffee shop with free wifi, attempting to defeat the forces of an obsolete version of MS Windows and write my novel. Younger still, I might have been in the recreation room of Mom and Dad’s split level, watching an after school special about how being reunited with one's lost puppy is a metaphor for finding meaning and purpose amid the chaos spawned by evil forces inhabiting the shadows beneath one’s bed.

The next time my wisteria blooms, I might be outside gardening downwind of the fragrant blooms of my white counter-clockwise twining Chinese Wisteria (Wisteria Sinensis) and appreciating life. The purple wisteria pictured here is in the front yard, and is the clockwise twining Japanese Wisteria (wisteria floribunda). Or, I might be meeting with my psychiatrist to unpack the formless fears engendered by a bad case of Alien Abduction Syndrome compounded with looming tendrils of senility.

What these glimpses of remembered past and imagined futures have in common – besides Lent and wisteria – are that they probably manifest some underlying dysfunction in the way I see the world and/or in which the world sees me. Last night, Tech Support Guy told me that atrial fibrillation has been associated with increased risk of Alzheimer’s and so have cold sores. This depresses me almost as much as if I experienced dramatically foreshadowing visions of, say, rafters dripping with blood.

Then it occurs to me that there is a positive side to losing one’s mind. One reason I am not visited by gloomy forebodings these days, is that with age comes acceptance. Also, thanks to my hearing impairment, the moaning of ghosts in the shadows outside my window no longer disturbs my rest.

The prospect of a fathomless future spent in a skilled nursing facility with a semi-deaf roommate who believes in heaven and hell, and swears that Lawrence Welk is alive and ageless scares the crap out of me. But like Grandma once said, the good thing about dementia is that the victim doesn’t know it. She might as well have said I may have Alzheimer’s but at least I don’t have Alzheimer’s.

So remember when you visit: my glassy-eyed unfocused stare and the perpetual dribble of drool at the corners of my mouth may frighten you, but inside my own head, I’m actually imagining that I am in an episode of Pigs in Space where Link Heartthrob proposes marriage and I accept. Which may not be such a bad place to spend eternity waiting for the wisteria to bloom, or for a sharp-beaked bird to wear down a mountain.

Wake Up!

2011-04-01T12:09:00.000-07:00

"Waken! my people, to the boughs green 
With ripening fruit within you! 
Waken to the myriad cinquefoil
 In the waving grass of your minds!
 Waken to the silent phoebe nest
 Under the eaves of your spirit!"
William Carlos Williams, The Wanderer (1914)

While winter snow blankets New England and tornados rage through Florida, Spring has arrived in my backyard. I’m ready to hit the garden to plant my seeds and prune the frost-killed branches. The bees are waking up, the irises are blooming, and even the calls of the mourning doves seem happy. I see birds – hawks, doves, thrushes and humming birds – cavorting in the sky two by two. The overwintering migratory tourist birds have gone and the local birds have begun ignoring feeders and noticing bugs and the flowers. Wild mustard covers the hills in swaths of pale yellow, and my seedlings are stretching their roots through the paper pots and leaning into the sun. Birds have to hunt, but plants make their own food.

My quilt of winter root vegetables is done. I had more success indoors than out this year with root crops. My onions and shallots outdoors have yet to flower and ripen.

The stone path winding through my quilt has been hand-embroidered “Garden with attitude” an intentionally ambiguous statement that may be advice or may be the name of the quilted garden of winter root vegetables. The fact that they're "mental" pleases me because I so frequently exhibit such attitudes as "beet it" beet and redlight radish.

Leeky, has been embellished with ribbon stalks and root tassels to emphasize that I clearly know Nature less the more I try to grow vegetables with attitude. The vegetables are fabric available from AnthroPoMorphCo.etsy.com. The back of my quilt includes the url as well as the peintws name of this pattern: "Make your own Friend! ...stuffed vegetable edition". I stuffed one set and made the quilt from another set.

For a while I’ve been too tired to blog. Now, suddenly, I have energy, and I’m too busy to blog. My winter activities of making cozy quilts, fermenting sauerkraut, and canning lemon lavender marmalade no longer entice me. The sunshine and the millions of shades of green are reaching beneath the eaves of my spirit and reminding me that I need Vitamin D and dirty fingernails.

I need the slow stretching exercise of garden work to relieve my winter-cramped muscles. The air is soft and it smells green. It’s time to sow my seeds and refresh my mind and body by working in the garden.

Nearer My Toilet to Thee

2011-03-15T15:46:00.000-07:00

"It's hard to be funny when you have to be clean."
Mae West

So, it's been well established that having a frightening cardiac event is not fun. We also learned that in instances of atrial fibrillation, don't take a nitro pill, let alone two. We learned that reporting to the ER intake person that you're having heart problems bumps you to the head of the line, though admittedly not one including bleeders.

Nor, to my great surprise, is it fun to surrender one's eyeglasses to the optometrist to have an old prescription replaced, and trying to wear a dizzying older prescription for another week. (Full disclosure: it is however, enjoyable to bitch like a little girl.)

Nor class, is the mother of all flu/intestinal cleanse/tummy aches much fun, particularly since I just wanted my mommy, and my mother has rested in peace for over 16 years, may she rest in peace. Spending a few days running between the bedroom and the bathroom is not fun. Trying to drink plenty of fluids to replace what seems to come out as soon as you put it in is no fun either. Yesterday was the first time since returning from the hospital - where I caught the nasty intestinal flu - that I have dared walk outside in the sunshine. That was fun.

Making a one-pot killer soup out of dried white beans and smoked pork hock. That's better. Watching my baby veggie starts discover impending Spring. Also better. Hearing FG nail her job interview was music to my hearing aids. Things are looking up all over.

Checking the unfortunately named expecting barn owls that overlook the veggie garden where I volunteer is fun too. You can visit the happy family here, or copy/paste this url: http://www.thegarden.org/owlcam.html

La Plus Sa Change...

2011-02-12T11:18:00.000-08:00

"'Who,' she asked, 'allowed the actress harlots  to approach this sick person?  These sorrows not only have not encouraged any cures,  but they actually nourish them further with sweet drugs.'"
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

Look, no offense, but what’s the point of trying to hide in the garden? When he gave his non-resignation-resignation speech the other night, it took US media about an hour to figure out why the CIA got it wrong (again) and why the people in the square were pissed.

My Favorite Unemployed Anthropoligist and Mideast Fortune Teller predicted it about an hour before it happened. Well, actually, she predicted that nothing new would be in the speech - that nothing would change.

She explained that Arab boys like martyrdom for the same reasons that Amerikan boyz like to play soldier. Explained that contrary to attempts to call this the Revolution of the Young Men this is about poor rising up and rich once again stomping them down. Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

This does more than harsh my mellow. It makes me fear my own government who has persistently guessed wrong, bet on the wrong horse, propped up the wrong figurehead, and wasted our blood and treasure on bread and circuses. And plus they called this wrong every time, only to be caught again without a chair when the music stops, or so much as a plan, or even a wish for a mockery of a sham of a plan. Crazies here are fomenting revolution too. They incite the poor, disaffected, while stacking the deck for the rich capitalists to win again.

As for the abdication of Egypt’s latest despot, trying to dress up the military coup as a bloodless revolution by the idealistic youth is like putting pancake makeup on an aging harlot. She might look good across a candle-lit room, but once the sun comes up the hangover begins. To see this as anything other than class war is as myopic as seeing the smiling old whore as a beckoning young courtesan.

IMHO, all that "roadmap to democratic elections" stuff is journalistic fill, while reporters wait for the real outcome to emerge. I find it interesting that when one talking head tried to say that on Chris Matthews last night, he called her a pessimist and said he preferred to see the wonderful flowering of a new democratic order emerge. To a certain extent I agree - the people on the street should be given at least 24 hours to celebrate before its back to business as usual. I can't imagine even those in the square who had hoped for this day haven’t had a restless thought about what happens next.

The Dow Jones went up yesterday on news of HN's departure. So, that says to me that the capitalists were ready for the protests to end, and the military took the hint. I keep thinking of all the rich cronies who benefitted from HN's rule. These days when even Swiss banks appear to have a conscience about blood money (they froze HNs accounts) it must be tough for rich people to figure out where to stash their riches.

Meanwhile, here at home, Pat Boone is wearing a gold jacket on TV and hawking the benefits of buying gold to the rich generation that thought he was a heartthrob back when we were all young. When our turn comes for a bloodless revolution, I'm not sure how much bread he'll be able to buy with his gold. I picture him being received with disfavor by hungry beggars when he shows up at the 7-11 to buy some pastry and a cup of hazelnut coffee with a gold bar. Listening to the lyrics of Lennon’s Imagine this morning is like drinking yesterday’s old coffee from a cold plastic cup.

A wise man once said: I just want you to know we’re counting on you. Good luck.

Dreams Kill

2011-02-10T15:33:00.000-08:00

Dream tonight of peacock tails,
Diamond fields and spouter whales.
Ills are many, blessings few,
But dreams tonight will shelter you.

Let the vampire's creaking wing
Hide the stars while banshees sing;
Let the ghouls gorge all night long;
Dreams will keep you safe and strong.

Skeletons with poison teeth,
Risen from the world beneath,
Ogre, troll, and loup-garou,
Bloody wraith who looks like you,

Shadow on the window shade,
Harpies in a midnight raid,
Goblins seeking tender prey,
Dreams will chase them all away.

Dreams are like a magic cloak
Woven by the fairy folk,
Covering from top to toe,
Keeping you from winds and woe.

And should the Angel come this night
To fetch your soul away from light,
Cross yourself, and face the wall:
Dreams will help you not at all.

— Thomas Pynchon, Dreams

Another cat posting

2011-02-03T09:24:00.001-08:00

I cannot do an existential rant nearly as well as Weeping Sore, but this photo is worth a thousand words. My grand-kitty in Chicago peers out at his balcony, the place where catnip grows in happier times. Will he ever feel joy again?

Episodes of Delirium

2011-02-02T12:46:00.000-08:00

"There are stories, like maps that agree... too consistent among too many languages and histories to be only wishful thinking.... It is always a hidden place, the way into it is not obvious, the geography is as much spiritual as physical. If you should happen upon it, your strongest certainty is not that you have discovered it but returned to it. In a single great episode of light, you remember everything."
— Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)

The black cat gets it. He remembers everything. His stare goes through me and I realize how much I’ve forgotten. I used to joke about how I was so competent in my profession that I’d forgotten more than most people knew about it. Now, I am astounded that I ever found humor in that tragic thought.

So what do I remember? I remember that I have been here before. The landscape changes and so do my own eyes. I know that guy in the painting in The Regal bar. I just can’t recall how I know him.

There was a clown drawn in sand at curb between two parking spaces. His story is the same as The Regal guy, and their story is the same as the cat’s and mine. And yours. We’re all here for a short while and then we’re gone so long, our existence seems ephemeral. But the story will go on, much more substantial than wishful thoughts, and it’s enough to remember that.

Guest Post from Michigan: Ford Thanks You

2011-01-28T20:53:00.000-08:00

Ford Motor Company and those of us supported by it are pleased to announce that it is doing really well. It earned $8.3 billion in 2010 — a profit of some $6.6B after debt payments. Both sales and market share are rebounding, partly because of the pay-off from years of restructuring and partly due to buyers wanting to go with the home-grown company that did not take a bail-out.

What many outside of this area and industry may not know is why it didn't need a bail-out. CEO Alan Mulally came here from Boeing in 2006 and almost immediately hocked everything in sight (including rights to the Blue Oval) as collateral on a $23.5B loan to pay for restructuring the company. He got that in just before the crash made such borrowing impossible. From 2006 through 2008, the company lost $30B. But the downsizing and the investment in great new products are finally paying off. After a huge payment last November, the remaining debt of $21B is now less than the cash on hand. Whew.

Keep in mind, though, that GM and Chrysler were able to cancel most of their debt through bankruptcy, so please feel free to continue rewarding Ford with your business.

I know the auto industry bail-out was not wildly popular outside this area, but please have some empathy. Given our over-dependence on a single industry, Michigan entered a persistent, one-state recession in 2000 and led the nation in unemployment for years before the rest of you joined us. We're a good, hard-working people, but this prolonged torture has been killing us. We are the only state that actually lost population since the 2000 census, as our folks leave in search of work. My own adult children left and will never move back. Our birth rate hasn't been this low since the 1870s.

I grew up in Maryland and have lived in Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Utah, and I can tell you that we are all more alike than we are different. So please don't vilify us for being on the ropes, any more than you would Illinois and California for their debt problems or Arizona and Nevada for their real estate crashes. We've all been hurting, and we all glory in the merest hints of recovery (at last!) that cheer us in this winter of jet-stream-hammered discontent.

Roadtrip 2010

2011-01-21T11:51:00.001-08:00

I'm still processing some of the great lessons I learned on this cross-country drive. I was about to declare moral bankruptcy, and the change of scenery and great company really cleaned the cobwebs from my head. I do sometimes have flashbacks about the perils of driving into winter in the badlands.

Then, there's the perils of driving through Ceour D'Alene Idaho and the white supremecist capital of this great nation. Some scary sights were seen.

Fight Nice, as Mom Used to Say

2011-01-17T11:37:00.001-08:00

"Sir, I cannot but lament, that a Gentleman of your acute Wit, rectified Understanding, and sublimated Imagination, should misapply those Talents to raise ill Humours in the Constitution of the Body Politick, of which your self are a Member, and upon the Health whereof your Preservation depends. Give me leave to say, such Principles as yours would again reduce us to the fatal Necessity of the Phlebotomy of War, or the Causticks of Persecution."

Esdras Barnivelt, aka, Alexander Pope, A Key to the Lock, 1715

Out of Order

2011-01-14T10:27:00.000-08:00

My mojo is not working today.

Perhaps tomorrow?

Superstition and Embroidery

2011-01-13T11:53:00.000-08:00

"Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?"
— Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49)

Pictured above is a Melaleuca quinquenervia, Cajeput Tree, native of Australia. Pynchon seems to be describing Seasonal Affective Disorder – that winter depressing that descends as the days grow dark and short. At least I understand the workings of the seasons and the changing length of the days. Maybe not magic, but something very like it makes me and my ego weary with cabin fever. The end of the week used to mean something important. The Friday workday began with a supervisor staff meeting that could take a couple of hours. It was possible to disappear into my own head while appearing to be eating bagels, drinking coffee, and giving a shit. Since I retired, it simply means two more days until washday – a tedious exercise in sorting dirty clothes and folding clean ones. But it beats the hell out of working for a living. Or embroidery for that matter.

Saturday is farmers’ market day if I don’t sleep until 10:30 like the lazy slug I have become, I go early and get the best stuff. If we go late, all the good produce is gone. I’ve seen fresher beets reading their poetry at the City Lights bookstore. The shriveled summer squash and old cucumbers look embarrassed to be seen outside of a Wal*Mart reduced for quick sale produce bin. Too many people bring their adorable dogs to these things, enabling one to risk life and/or limb to cross from one row of tables to the next. At least people pushing those over-laden baby strollers outfitted with enough gear to supply an Arctic exhibition are more predictable in their movements than over-stimulated pets in a crowded outdoor market.

One thing I don’t have to go far for is fresh citrus. My baby kefir lime and blood orange won’t produce fruit for a few more years. But meanwhile, if I didn’t have access to the lemon and oranges and limes in The Garden, all I’d have to do is take a walk around any block, and pick fruit overhanging neighboring fences.

So, it’s back inside to finish the quilt. As with most things I’ve sown in my life, by the time I’m finished, I am thoroughly tired of it. I feel like there must be more creative energy dimly flickering in the brainstem of a mushroom than I have at the moment, slowed down my usual winter sluggishness and more-than-usual holiday overeating. Fortunately, I have enough useless hobbies and half-finished projects to keep me busy until the blood in my veins wakes up and tells me it’s time to plant tomatoes.

At least the days are getting a tiny bit longer. Even if the metaphorical tower is indeed wherever I go, the returning sun is better than a knight in shining armor to rescue me from the winter blahs. Not to mention, marrying a disk jockey.

Back to the Rough Ground

2011-01-05T11:38:00.000-08:00

“We have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!“
- Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

I’m wondering again if I have already failed the test of time. Not a great way to begin the long slow slide through a new year. Winter is a difficult time to have a garden, as I spend most of the time indoors.

When I do stroll through the yard on a mild sunny morning, I walk the rain-drenched, and wind-whipped paths seeming to notice only what has been lost: the deadheaded mums, the bloomed out resting rose bushes, and other evidence of death and dying. The gardens are a sorry mess, with small plants smashed by wind and rain and yet to recover. They seem to be sleeping in heaps on the ground like so many small neglected graves. Pretty rough ground.

How we see our gardens – and our lives - depends very much on our sense of time and the passage of time. When we consider it at all, we generally tend think of time as rectilinear – a nice straight line from the past behind us to the future ahead. Our present seems only a brief point on the timeline. Time is a flowing river. Because I recently did more than flip a page on a calendar - I began a whole new calendar - I can’t help but think of January as marking some kind of new beginning. The new calendar shouts “January!” like an announcement that I can have a fresh start; a second chance to do things right; the perpetual gardener’s seasonal do-over.

Wittgenstein was saying our language shapes our thoughts, and how we manipulate language puts us on rough ground where we can at least get some friction to turn our wheels. To describe what we see in our gardens we must use language that shapes and colors our perceptions. Like the Greeks who saw time as cyclical, gardeners often tend to think in terms of seasons that turn, and re-turn, like a wheel.

However we see the passage of time – including our own stories bounded by our own beginnings, middles and endings - gardeners tend to think of our stories in terms of seasons. January is the month I begin to observe signs of life and renewal. I see Iris, amaryllis and snowdrops, poking their sharp green swords tentatively above ground. I see unpruned wisteria branches fattening their buds and waiting for their moment. I look forward to getting back outside to the rough ground.

Enjoying Transitory Seasonal Splendors

2010-12-29T11:51:00.000-08:00

"Vain transitory splendours! Could not all 
Reprieve the tottering mansion from its fall!
Obscure it sinks, nor shall it more impart 
An hour's importance to the poor man's heart."
- Oliver Goldsmith, Ill Fares the Land

Pictured at left is a glowing white mansion of a spiderweb, now long erased by the rain. This is the contemplative time of year.

Even the birds – mostly pale pink-hued house finches - gather around the big bird feeder for their morning meeting are going about their business quietly. The wind gusts restlessly and the rain beats softly on the roof. The garden was washed clean in last week’s rain, and today's rain is just enough to waken the fresh smells. The air is perfumed by the ubiquitous eucalyptus trees, and carries just the faintest lighter note of the narcissus flowers.

The narcissus bulbs – potted, brought indoors, and forced - rewarded the gardener’s faith and bloomed for solstice. They were banished to the patio when they beame tired and began to nod their heads. Today, ragged and way past their prime, they sit reprivingly just outside the door, smugly drinking the fresh rain and reminding me that they'll be back. As I stand on the covered patio, I catch heir fragrance - just right and not as overpowering as it was its full glory indoors - where they imparted an imposing and melancholy fragrance reminiscent of an old overly ornate, overheated funeral home.

Even the dying flowers seem to be reproving me smugly. They are far from dead. Instead of mourning the lost mansions of their prime, they are considering their accomplishments this year with satisfaction. They turn their backs on the gardener; they carry away stores of energy into their unknown future.

Meanwhile back inside, the season of mail order catalog abundance is over. The seed catalog season is now well underway. Gardening catalogs tantalize the gardener daily with their colorful pictures promising impossible fruits and flowers. And succulent vegetables bursting with tastes.

Outside my window rain falls promising nourishment to my garden and enabling drought-stressed inhabitants to stretch and recover strength. Inside, paging through these seed catalogs cozy and dry, my gardening ambitions are stoked; and it’s easy to forget I live in a desert where vines of sweet, fat pumpkins and heirloom tomatoes have to struggle to survive. Indoors and out, we all remember in our own ways this the price we pay for living in paradise.

As this picture shows, I learned much on Roadtrip 2010, even from bathroom graffiti. This puts me in the perfect mood for the perfect day at the rainy end of a good year. A meditation about how even the most glorious gardens provide only transitory splendors, eventually no longer experienced, only remembered; inevitably forgotten. Like the gardens we cultivate, we all end up as stories, remembered for a while and then fading like the narcissus. This year’s story has been hard, but it has been a very good one.

Bad Signs of the Times

2010-12-16T13:35:00.001-08:00

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth ‘tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure.

- Edward Thomas, “Roads”, The Ickneid Way

We did see some monumentally disturbing signs of the times on our recent roadtrip. Here's a taste:

What about dinosaurs? BOLO: Dinosaurs!

"It is a common and just Observation, that when the Meaning of any thing is dubious, one can no way better judge of the true Intent of it, than by considering who is the Author, what is his Character in general, and his Disposition in particular."
Alexander Pope

We may have discovered an unknown species of dinosaur on the roadtrip.

Printer Ink vs. Dinosaur Hunting

2010-12-06T11:30:00.001-08:00

“You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the sea’s double rocks, and you now inhabit a foreign land.” - Medea

I got everyone ink cartridges for their printers for Xmas, from a fancy mail order place somewhere overseas. Despite my prayers and the heavenly manifestation of a sacred ball of light in the television, I’m beginning to worry that they will not be delivered in time.

By way apology in advance for not having Xmas presents for all my dear friends and family, I offer this tip on some cheap land for sale in Montana. Apparently you can hunt deer and horses as well as dinosaurs on this land, so, enough said.

Fourteen FAQ Answers

2010-12-04T11:40:00.000-08:00

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look and it was gone, I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown, the dream is gone.

The Great Boston molasses flood of 1919.

Yes, there is an approved form for that.

We use white rabbit hair that is dyed pink.

Genius lives on. All else is merely transitory.

The report called it an unidentified particulate.

We get that one all the time. The American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology has a network of pollen counters across the United States. Each counter works under the direction of an AAAAI member and must first pass a certification course provided through the AAAAI.

I would prefer not to.

It was like that when I got here.

Yes: vegetarians can eat animal crackers.

That would be Jacques Chirac.

These people are beyond science, logic and reason. They have strangled the fuzzy bunny of reason, backed over it with their under-inflated off-road tires of ignorance, popped it into reverse, and driven over reason’s flattened bloody corpse.

Although this poison is colorless and tasteless, the presence of arsenic has been detectable since the Marsh test was developed in 1836. So, no.

Once, if my memory serves me well, my life was a banquet where every heart revealed itself, where every wine flowed.

Safe for Snakes

2010-12-02T15:41:00.000-08:00

"I will choose a place where the snakes feel safe.
All day I will love that remote country.
At times I will climb the peak of its lonely mountain
To stay and whistle until the sky grows cold."
- W. S. Merwin

I was over-thinking the things I learned on the road. I learned that a bare flat horizon of badlands feels much lonelier than mountains and places where the sky is very busy. I was trying to figure out why I like mountains better than open prairies. Then I remembered. I’m not a rugged cowgirl or mamma bear or other stoic frontier type. I’m a city girl who is trying to learn how to grow tomatoes.

The neat thing about the trip was that conversation was eclectic, thought-provoking and intermittent. Sometimes, we’d ride in silence for an hour. Or sometimes we’d have shorthand conversations: Need coffee? Pee alert level yellow! Look a squirrel! Mom! Stop wasting film on neon signs! (I have, in addition to low-battery anxiety, a need to take pictures of places. This often means taking pictures of signs. It was a road trip and we spent more time on the roads than doing tourist stuff. And yes, my biggest regret was not stopping at the SPAM museum. Probably the last chance this lifetime...)

At one of the silent, contemplative times, my train of thought was brought to a screeching halt as I was once again amazed by the scenery. Instead of seeing the Rastafarian rat - who presumably is a poor speller, and who presumably lives beneath the red neon sign above - I saw this manifestation of a certain copyrighted mouse whose iconic presence was a big part of my childhood.

The Disneyfication of legends and nursery rhymes seems far away driving through America in late November. Yet, when I saw this apparition in the sky, I couldn’t help but feel safe. Sort of like the bat signal only different. Mickey calling me home to SoCal. I’m hoping my snakes feel safe here too, because I’m sticking around.

Today

2010-12-01T12:49:00.000-08:00

"That virgin, vital, beautiful day: today."

Stephane Mallarme

Never Give All the Heart

2010-11-30T13:13:00.000-08:00

By: W.B. Yeats

Never give all the heart, for love 
Will hardly seem worth thinking of 
To passionate women if it seem 
Certain, and they never dream 
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.

O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough 
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

The Loud Laugh that Spoke the Vacant Mind

2010-11-29T15:06:00.000-08:00

“Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed,
In nature's simplest charms at first arrayed;
But verging to decline, its splendours rise,
Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise;"
- Oliver Goldsmith, A Deserted Village

What I learned on my recent 3-week roadtrip is something I haven’t worked through. I didn’t keep a daily journal, so I already have some trouble remembering when I saw some strange never-visited cities in the vast American heartland - Billings Montana, Rochester Minnesota, Albert Lea South Dakota; Coeur D’Alene Idaho, Missoula Montana. I have millions of pictures of the sights I saw. Putting into words the things I learned will take a while, and might be facilitated by forgetting some details.

But meanwhile, the single most important thing I learned is that you CAN come home again – just don’t expect it to look like the land you called home as you grew up. After living in this place for most of my life, I think I have finally come home.

I have been reading Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land” which got me searching for the Oliver Goldsmith poem A Deserted Village quoted in Judt’s title, and in the title of this post. Which got me thinking about what I saw and did on our roadtrip home from Atlanta to San Diego via the northern cross country highways. What we ever did before mapquest navigation, urbanspoon, radar weather and other magical apps like Talking Carl, not to mention the legendary Nascar app and the mythical app to find Christian churches, I will never know. Well, I did know once, but can’t remember. Nor can I imagine travel without my iphone. We checked in via the Book of Faces and this will help me to reconstruct our trip and match cities to pictures. Of course J (my travelling companion) took pictures with an iphone and thus has them ready to post to Flikr complete with tags showing date and location of picture.

But to get back to the blogging of RoadTrip2010: Two Californians Venture Across the Badlands in November. What were we thinking? I can attest however, that we are both outspoken, and posses (arguably intermittently vacant) minds, and that we laughed loudly.

As I read The Deserted Village, I saw a number of parallels between our road trip and the sights awaiting native of fictional Auburn who returns to his blissful childhood and finds it lost. Disclaimer: I have had my poetic license revoked for failure to distinguish cliché from wisdom, intentional torture of metaphors, and negligent spelling and grammatical fauxes pas. Nevertheless, I intend to post about the Roadtrip for a while as I digest the things to be remembered, forget the things to be forgotten, and try to blog what I might have learned and/or lost.

Albert Lea, Minnesota

2010-11-13T12:41:00.001-08:00

We are stranded here in a hotel overlooking US Route 90 in western Minnesota. The Google says we are about 1,000 miles from Atlanta GA. Admittedly, we are attempting a dumb route to Berkeley, CA but we wanted to go north through Seattle WA.

The trip is still an adventure. I can't figure out how to upload pictures from my phone. Or I would post a bleakly beautiful view of an open pearls and snow falling sideways.

Testing mobile blogging.

2010-11-13T07:41:00.001-08:00

This might just work.

Sent from my iPhone

The Last Pain

2010-11-02T12:38:00.001-07:00

This last pain for the damned the Fathers found:
"They knew the bliss with which they were not crowned."
Such, but on earth, let me foretell,
Is all, of heaven or of hell.

"Man, as the prying housemaid of the soul,
May know her happiness by eye to hole;
He's safe; the key is lost; he knows
Door will not open, nor hole close.

"What is conceivable can happen too,"
Said Wittgenstein, who had not dreamt of you;
But wisely; if we worked it long
We should forget where it was wrong.

Those thorns are crowns which, woven into knots,
Crackle under and soon boil fool's pots;
And no man's watching, wise and long,
Would ever stare them into song.

Thorns burn to a consistent ash, like man;
A splendid cleanser for the frying-pan:
And those who leap from pan to fire
Should this brave opposite admire.

All those large dreams by which men long live well
Are magic-lanterned on the smoke of hell;
This then is real, I have implied,
A painted, small, transparent slide.

These the inventive can hand-paint at leisure,
Or most emporia would stock our measure;
And feasting in their dappled shade
We should forget how they were made.

Feign then what's by a decent tact believed,
And act that state is only so conceived,
And build an edifice of form
For house where phantoms may keep warm.

Imagine, then, by miracle, with me,
(Ambiguous gifts, as what gods give must be)
What could not possibly be there,
And learn a style from a despair.

Rain and Chicken Soup

2010-10-25T16:42:00.000-07:00

"Maybe, just once, someone will call me 'Sir' without adding, 'You're making a scene'."
- Homer Simpson

I’m not inclined to the dramatic today. Which is just as well, because nobody has called me Sir/M’am lately. Nor have I been making public spectacles of myself. Not that I remember, anyway. Which might be a clue, but I’ve also been undergoing a bout of cluelessness lately. Anyway, I think I am coming around.

Rain helps. It seems to water my soul after the long dry spell, with its promise of renewal. Rain is pattering down just enough outside to make me want to stay inside and make soup out of yesterday’s roast chicken. I could wax poetic about the rain and/or chicken soup, but I simply can’t compete with the eloquence of Homer Simpson, so you’ll just have to imagine the scene. Misty rain outside, and rich chicken broth inside.

While vegetable simmer in the broth, I clean the bird like my Mom used to do: two bowls, the carcass, a knife. She’d sit and pick the meat off the bones, carefully placing the unadulterated meat in one bowl, cut into bite sizes with the paring knife against her right thumb. The gristle, skin, and bones mostly went into the other bowl. The fun part was what became of the uncertain bits. Those would be popped into her mouth with the crispy skin. If you hung around, she’d pop a bit of chicken in your mouth too.

When Mom ate chicken, the bones would be left looking like they’d been out in the desert a month – they were so clean they were white. Mom died 16 years ago next month. That time of year, the first snow might be falling. I’m a long way from snow, but the gentle raindrops clinging to the pine trees look like snow if I squint.

So, I’ve got winter outdoors, and some very nostalgic smells inside. Which leaves me with a very healthy “mission accomplished” feeling this afternoon. And which leaves me to conclude with another bit of questionable wisdom from Homer: All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals. What Homer said.

Autumn Color

2010-10-15T15:05:00.000-07:00

“The forms in which we learn to think of landscape are forms that we have got from painted canvas. Any man can see and understand a picture; it is reserved for the few to separate anything out of the confusion of nature, and see that distinctly and with intelligence.“
Robert Louis Stevens, An Autumn Effect

Today, it’s hard to miss the arrival of a new season. It is coming on strong, bringing grey skies and softer lighting that at first seems to make things look dull and thick compared to the recent of the bright lights and colors of summer.

For those familiar with the almost unbelievably bright colors of autumn in New England, the sparse autumn colors of southern California seem at first dull and miserable in October afternoon lights. The few deciduous trees in my yard, like the struggling purple ornamental plum and the liquid amber trees drop their leaves with little fanfare: they fade from an unenthusiastic yellow to quiet shades of brown, and then one morning they’re gone.

So it rained, and brought a week of cloudy skies and drizzle along with cooler nights, shorter days, and less sunshine. We are beginning the season of mixed blessings. In exchange for the gardener’s relief from hot dry weather, the rains offer not just a relief from the dry heat but protect the exhausted landscape from fires that the wind blowing west. The first heavy rains not only wash off the parched leaves and branches, they clean out the deadfall, particularly from the eucalyptus trees which tend to shed and peel bark beneath their branches so they end up sitting on top of small hills made from their discarded growth. After the first rain, our driveway is covered with leaves and bark that sheds like snakeskin.

But if you can welcome our gentle autumn with subtle almost monochrome colors, there is beauty waiting for those with the a gardener’s intelligence to see. The sky seems bigger than it did in summer when the living earth distracted my glance, and new somber shades of blue and grey are used to make thicker and more ominous-looking clouds. They hurry across the sky, flirting with sunshine in the chill winds.

Then there are the colors of the eucalyptus trees - there are 600-700 different species, native to Australia but naturalized in California for about a hundred years. The eucalyptus tree is not deciduous, instead continually growing and replacing leaves. Also called gum trees, their bark peels and drops and litters the surrounding area that they are often (mistakenly) presumed to be allopathic. They are messy however, particularly when the first rains are vigorous enough to pare dead growth from stem and trunk.

I fondly recall my seasons in the north east US with their pageantry and rich colors. But I now find nothing more reassuring as the gardening year winds down here than the still art of eucalyptus bark painted in the colors of the landscape and as understandable as Steven’ picture of autumn.

About One Hundred Autumns Ago

2010-10-09T14:47:00.000-07:00

"The weather is only a little west of south for one of the last fair days of the year; and the gloom of the yew in the churchyard... which seems the residue of the dark past, has its antiquity full of little smouldering embers of new life again; and so a lazy man has reasons to doubt whether the millennium is worth all this hurry."
Henry Major Tomlinson, An Autumn Morning

I wish I could write like this author. Tomlinson was a veteran of World War I who was coping not only with post-traumatic stress of a war to end all wars, he was still young enough to remember the world that existed before his generation turned into soldiers; the world that was gone forever by the time the survivors returned home. The story begins in the Autumn of 1918. The war is over, but “life is real, life is earnest”.

Here’s how it begins:

“SEPTEMBER 28, 1918. The way to my suburban station and the morning train admonishes me sadly with its stream of season-ticket holders carrying dispatch-cases, and all of them anxious, their resolute pace makes it evident, for work. This morning two aeroplanes were over us in the blue, in mimic combat; they were, of course, getting into trim for the raid to-night, because the barometer is beautifully high and steady. But the people on their way to the 9.30 did not look up at the flight. Life is real, life is earnest. When I doubt that humanity knows what it is doing, I get comfort from watching our local brigadiers and Whitehall ladies on their way these tranquil Autumn mornings to give our planet another good shove towards the millennium. Progress, progress! I hear their feet overtaking me, brisk and resolute, as though a revelation had come to them overnight, and so now they know what to do, undiverted by any doubt…”

Walking on, he turns from the main road into a side street he last walked with his friend who never returned from war. It was “… a street which turns abruptly from my straight road to the station. It goes like a sudden resolution to get out of this daily hurry and excitement. It is a pre-war street. It is an ancient thoroughfare of ours, a rambling and unfrequented by-way. It is more than four years since it was a habit of mine to loiter through it, with a man with whom I shall do no more pleasant idling. We enjoyed its old and ruinous shops and its stalls, where all things could be bought at second-hand, excepting young doves, ferrets, and dogs. I saw it again this morning, and felt, somehow, that it was the first time I had noticed it since the world suddenly changed. Where had it been in the meantime? It was empty this morning, it was still, it was luminous. It might have been waiting, a place that was, for the return of what can never return. Its sunlight was different from the glare in the hurrying road to the station. It was the apparition of a light which has gone out…”

He sees a bookstore he used to visit with his friend. On impulse, he enters the store and sees the same old shopman who was always there. The shopman was pretty old school even before the war: “If you showed no real interest in what you proposed to buy he would refuse to sell it.”

Here is how the story ends:

“I came upon a copy of Walden, in its earliest Camelot dress (price sixpence), and remembered that one who was not there had once said he was looking for it in that edition. I turned to the last page and read: ‘Only that day dawns to which we are awake...’

"I reserved the book for him at once, though knowing I could not give it to him. But what is the good of cold reason? Are we awake in such dawns as we now witness? Or has there been no dawn yet because we are only restless in our sleep? It might be either way, and in such a perplexity reason cannot help us. I thought that perhaps I might now be stirring, on the point of actually rousing. There, in any case, was the evidence of that fugitive spark of the early summer of 1914 still imprisoned in its crystal, proof that the world had experienced a dawn or two. An entirely unreasonable serenity possessed me--perhaps because I was not fully roused--because of the indestructibility of those few voiceless hopes we cherish that seem as fugitive as the glint in the crystal ball, hopes without which our existence would have no meaning, for if we lost them we should know the universe was a witless jest, with nobody to laugh at it.

"'I want this book,' I said to the shopman.

"'I know,' he answered, without looking up. 'I've kept it for you.'"

Redecorating

2010-09-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

Autumn already! - But why regret the everlasting sun, if we are sworn to a search for divine brightness, - far from those who die as seasons turn.
Rimbaud, Farewell

For several years now, I’ve been planning to install a shishi odoshi, or “deer scare” adjacent to the old pond where we had one many years ago. Here is the site before I began: the water feature is in the deep shade beneath the palm leaf, and behind the potman on his little chair.

The shishi odoshi has a large bamboo rocker arm closed on one side and open to a small stream of water at the other. The arm is then mounted so it pivots at the balance point. As the tube fills with water, it slowly overfills and tips; emptying the water and making a lovely sound as the bamboo strikes the rock. The sound of the hollow bamboo tube, knocking on a large rock every time the tube fills with water, pivots, and tips to empty is strangely peaceful. I doubt that it scares anybody, but unlike every other standing water feature in my yard, birds do not seem to drink from this new installation, so maybe it does scare them.

We got a new shishi odoshi several years ago at a local craft fair, but I finally got around to beginning the project to hook it up. The challenge isn’t plumbing so much as excavating, cleaning out the overgrown spot where ginger colonized in the shade of an old palm.

The site held several years of accumulated weeds and dirt, rocks, as well as black widow and other spiders. This is one of the few tasks that I will only undertake wearing good garden gloves. When moving stones and rocks, gloves are necessary to protect my hands from being cut, and to avoid encrusting the cuts with dirt, but more importantly to protect me from disturbed spiders as I evict them from their lairs.

The water drip is fed from a small submersible aquarium pump inside a completely contained reservoir that re-circulates the water – we have electricity nearby to power the pump. Because of inevitable leaks and drips, the entire arrangement must sit on top of the reservoir. This assures that water is lost only to evaporation and not to drips that don’t return water to the reservoir.

By the time I was done with the preparation, excavation and placement of the reservoir, I realized the black plastic storage box was too small to contain both ends of the shishi odoshi AND the drip-line of the sounding rock I had chosen. Since I really wanted to use the hollowed out hypertufa pot as the source of my mountain spring, I was forced to choose either the shishi odoshi or the hollowed out rock itself. I went with the rock, and Tech Support Guy drilled a hole in the bottom for the tube leading from the reservoir. He also drilled a handful of small holes in the lid of the plastic storage box/reservoir to allow the water to drain beneath the rocks and return to the reservoir.

I even took some of the plentiful moss from the ground beneath the big old pine tree, and smooshed it into some of the grooves in the tufa pot. I’d love to see the moss naturalize itself here. I have found that I get algae in the other tsukubai, and have to pour in a splash of Clorox in once in a while to keep it from looking greasy with algae. Since the tsukubai gets direct sun half the day, I think that may be the source of the algae problem. The new water feature is in full shade all day, so I’m hoping the moss will thrive and the algae won’t.

Later, I’ll try to install the shishi odoshi elsewhere in the garden, perhaps at a spot where it can be powered by a solar pump. But meanwhile, I now have an inviting cool spring bubbling qieetly over moss, near the place where the new stone table and benches will go, replacing the old decomposing stone table and benches - but that's another project.

Who knew?

2010-09-18T15:29:00.000-07:00

"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of partiotism and exposing the country to danger."*

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it." **

* Herman Goering

** Douglas MacArthur

Potheads of a Good Kind

2010-09-12T14:18:00.001-07:00

"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence— whether much that is glorious— whether all that is profound— does not spring from disease of thought— from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."
- Edgar Allen Poe, "Eleonora"

“My short-term memory is fine! What I may lack in attention span, I make up in…”
- A Pothead I have known

My lampshade pots are now in place, but many of the succulent cuttings dripping down the sides through holes in the top of the pots are not yet firmly rooted.

The grass in the top is a lovely but dangerously sharp striped variegated green and white grass. The transplant on the left got a major head start over the other because the grass in the right pot was previously planted in a place where it got less water. It should take off now.

The hanging man and woman, my potheads, each have a different grass. The coolest thing about the potheads is that when watered, the man actually cries since there are holes in the pot where his eyes were carved.

I’m thinking of calling them Eleanora and Benny. I name many of the inanimate objects in my yard. This tradition began with Simone, the 2 foot long rubber lizard/alligator that once served as J’s burglar alarm and who now lives on the rocks of the old waterfall, overlooking all the nighttime predators that have decimated my koi pond.

The best thing of all about this arrangement by the front sidewalk is that one of the few surviving drip systems waters them daily, making them lovely but pretty ignorable. The biggest potential problem is that the pots on the ground, purchased for < $20 at a lamp store are so dangerously thin and delicate; they can be tipped over by a heartfelt sigh of admiration within two feet. Accordingly, they are each staked from behind with pieces of tomato cage that, I hope, will keep them upright in anything short of a stampede of raging buffalo.

Family Visit

2010-09-07T12:03:00.001-07:00

“Do you know what is better than charity and fasting and prayer? It is keeping peace and good relations between people, as quarrels and bad feelings destroy mankind.”
Prophet Mohammed,
Sahih al-Bukhari (صحيح البخاري‎)

We just finished a lovely weeklong visit with family. Keeping good relations with relations is indeed better than fasting and prayer, but then again, even my appointment tomorrow for a root canal beats fasting and prayer in my book. What’s even better is catching up in ongoing casual conversations, eating good food, drinking good beer, making vineyard peach and raspberry jam with cardamom, and watching old episodes of Max Headroom.

Now it’s back to frugal eating and drinking, paying bills, and of course, to blogging. Today I’m making stock using some nasty looking soup bones and left-over carrots and other miscellaneous vegetables from the farmer’s market. Tonight we’ll have the last two gorgeous artichokes. Later this week, I’ll be making a veal stew using today’s stock.

Now, it’s also back to the interrupted yard project: removing ubiquitous Bermuda grass from the “dry” riverbed where the pond overflow drains if the pond is over-filled. I attain a certain Zen-like peace sitting on my rolling wagon seat and lifting baseball-sized river rocks, yanking out grass and debris, and then putting down a new layer of the hardware cloth that’s supposed to keep the grass from growing amid the rocks.

Summer may be over and school may be back in session, but there’s still plenty of mild weather ahead for me to finish the yard projects before the days become too short and chilly to entice me outdoors.

When Screaming and Scolding Fail

2010-08-26T12:05:00.000-07:00

“Oh! If to dance all Night, and dress all Day,
Charmn’d the Small-pox, or chas’d old Age away;
Who would not scorn what Housewife’s Cares produce,
Or who would learn one earthly Thing of Use?

“But since, alas! Frail Beauty must decay,
Curl’d or uncurl’d, since Locks will turn to grey;
Since painted, or not painted, all shall fade,
And she who scorns a Man, must die a Maid,
What then remains but well our Pow’r to use,
And keep good Humour still what’er we lose?

“And trust me, dear! Good Humour can prevail,
When Airs, and Flights, and Screams, and Scolding fail.
Beauties in vain their pretty Eyes may roll;
Charms strike the Sight, but Merit wins the Soul.”

Esdras Barivelt, pseudonym used by Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, 1715

In my never-ending quest for the prime metaphor, a sort of grand unified metaphor of everything, I can never go wrong with hard-boiled noir detective fiction a la Raymond Chandler. To me, elegant metaphors are the hallmark of intelligent writing - sort of like writing full of wisecracks and irony metaphorically cut a path of death and destruction through good writing like that left in the wake of a turbulent hurricane cutting across an Oklahoma countryside.

I recently read a mystery story that began with a big mistake in a workplace, followed by a ranting boss, threatening that his workers better clean things up, or more heads would roll than cabbage in a cole slaw factory. I have absolutely no recollection of what the rest of the story was about, so taken I was, by the visual magic of that metaphor.

Meanwhile, back in the actual world, the faux pharmacist Esdra Barivelt (aka Alexander Pope) says it’s better to have a sense of humor than good looks because the former presumably remains shiny and bright, while all beauty fades. Wrong.

A sense of humor is, I think, subject to the normal wear and tear of a human life, and is just as subject to being slowly worn down as youth and beauty. Imagine how smooth and round Sisyphus’ rock must have become from being rolled up and down that hill all those years. One’s sense of humor may end up rubbed down by overuse, nicked and scarred by the slings and arrows of ennui, the attempted suicides, the bad hair days, court-ordered anger management classes, and the failed gardening ventures of life. Good metaphors encapsulate a life of love and loss without the overt anger and bitterness of an exhausted rant. I’m just guessing here, but if he was writing today, I suspect that pharmacist Esdra Barivelt would run a meth lab.

Gardening in this season is like watching an aging beauty refusing to go gently in that good night of old age and early bird specials at Golden Corral ("We deep fry every buffet dish in lard, so you don’t have to!"). Unfortunately, knowing this and practicing this are fish of two different kettles. I’m not ready to give up and accept that screaming and scolding may fail to make my garden thrive. Regardless of what this may imply with regard to my gardening/parenting/hairdressing skills, I continue to hope that once my boy gets out of jail, and my daughter finishes her community service, they’ll give up their own attempts at cooking meth and take their places beside me and Pa as jugglers and clowns in the circus. After all, if life is but a joke, at least we can use our powers well to make the punch line worthwhile.

Winds of Change are Blowing

2010-08-18T12:51:00.000-07:00

" You don’t need a weather vane to know which way the wind blows."
Somebody Else

Ok, I know I’ve said this before about summer coming, but it’s really here now. A week of temps in the 90s with dry winds that signal only the beginning of the santa ana hot dry fire season. We may not get oil spills or floods, but we get earthquakes and fires.

I haven’t felt all that inspired to work outdoors during the last few mild weeks and months. So, naturally, I spent yesterday afternoon in the back yard, sweating and moving my little wheeled seat/tool cart around the patio to keep it in the shade. I weeded between the paving stones, something I’ve never had to do before.

This summer, I’ve had the patio watered with a timed sprinkler. It hasn’t received enough via my hand watering for the past several years since the automatic sprinklers died. Who knew? And after removing clover, what I think my Mom used to call chick-weed (sp?) and some other ubiquitous weed that grows like ground cover, I carefully put in creeping thyme cuttings dippend in root hormone. Martha in Michigan calls one of the thymes lime - I think because of the color of the foliage - and it has small pink flowers if it gets enough sun. There’s another kind with foliage that is more bluish, and I also put in some of that. I may actually achieve my dream of a sustainable flagstone patio as long as the water holds out long enough for the thyme to establish itself. Once established, I think I can cut back on watering. Time will tell.

I also managed to plant some more in my layered tall pots that I got for $8 and $10 at the lamp store. I think they’re supposed to be ceramic lampshades, but Tech Support Guy drilled holes in the bottom and I’m planting them with what I envision will be a killer succulent arrangement. I won’t post pics until I see how things turn out. The top 4 inches of these 20” and 15” tall planters is full of small holes almost like lace. The pots themselves are very dainty and have already been glued back together. Again. Time will tell.

This has been a rough summer for me physically with more than a fair share of aches and pains.

I spent the last half hour of my outdoor time, sitting in the chairs, meditating on happiness and controlling pain, because of course, I strained my back at the end of the day. Later, after some killer homemade meatloaf with a healthy dose of roasted tomatoes and peppers, I resorted to controlled substances to control my pain. I have a pretty high tolerance for chronic back pain in the cervical spine but I’m not so biblically accustomed to low back pain. But as my crazier relatives often say: It’s getting better.

The Manual of Detection

2010-08-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

“If you are not setting a trap, then you are probably walking into one. It is the mark of the master to do both at once.”
“Woe to he who checkmates his opponent last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage.”
- Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection

Have you ever had a workday filled with rain and gloom, and felt you were the only awake person populating your nightmares filled with zombies? If you answered yes then have I got the book for you. Here is how one character describes it:

“…that is how I feel sometimes, as though the world has already ended, the shades drawn over every window, the stars burned down to little black beads, the moon waned beyond waning, all life a dollop of ash, and still I remain at work trying to explain what happened”.

Allow me to digress.

Before retiring from my secret identity as a bureaucrat with a brain, and becoming a gardening superhero, I had a lot in common with the book's protagonist, aptly named Charlie Unwin. As my retirement to a cottage in the country approached, I began to shut down some of these dreams of dreams and dreamers in my professional life. I paid for my own last set of business cards. Instead of using my “payroll title” of Buyer IV, I printed “Buyer Princess”. Some people asked what the fuck, but most people silently shuffled these cards into the deck of business cards exchanged like poker chips at the outset of any meeting of three or more overlords in management. They might have been sleepwalking.

But I digress.

Unlike Unwin, my last official act before I got promoted to retirement, I too took steps to leave my own mysteries behind. I left the following message on my voicemail and changed the password, from the number neatly printed on masking tape to the phone: Hello, today is October 24, 2003. I’m not available right now, but I care about your call, so please leave a message and… Yeah, no, wait. I’m retired. I could give a rat’s ass.” Followed by a first class evil laugh bbbwaaahaahaa.

I dreamed that this message was finally deleted by tech support at the request of an unnamed middle management overlord who, when this matter was brought to his attention by an angry overlord who out-ranked him, felt it necessary to employ considerable use of the f-bomb in describing his rank and importance, not to mention his opinion of the level of sick humor and fucking wooden-clogs-thrown-between-gears this once loyal and highly competent former teamwork-award-winning employee (me) managed to do to his customer satisfaction ratings.

I papered some of the certificates of recognition I’d received, removed their plastic frames, and embedded them in the wallpaper behind some rooms in my dollhouse, in an attempt to leave clues to this mysteries. But again, I digress.

For all my bureaucratic exploits, the bureaucrats in this book make me hang my head in shame at my own level of competence. My business correspondence never rose to the level of obfuscation employed by the sinisterly named Miss Burgrave:

“This will not do… You know what it means to be on a schedule, of course, so I will not rebuke you unnecessarily, as that would be tantamount to redundancy, which I already risk by speaking to you at all, and risk again by observing the risk, and so again by observation. In this we would proceed endlessly. Will you not relent? Are you really so stubborn? I ask these questions rhetorically, and thus degrade further the value of my speech.”

The Manual of Detection helped me understand that when I retired, I took something more than the smoke and ashes of bitterness with me. I took: “The long-term memory of our esteemed organization. Without it we are nothing but a jumble of trivialities, delusions, and windblown stratagems.” I can hardly tell you how sorry I am about that. I couldn’t be sorrier.

So, bureaucrats rise up! With all due respect, I insist that you discard your copy of latest the organizational guru cheerleading substance-free book/cd/2-day continuing education course with the phrase “…making the most of hidden skills…” that your management development team manager recently assigned. Buy the Manual of Detection and study it well. Then, google “sabotage,” wake up, and promote yourself.

The Idle Gardener’s Mind

2010-08-04T14:35:00.001-07:00

"Dic mihi quid melius desidiosus agas"
The line from Martial (8.3.12) translates "Tell me, what better will you find to do in your idleness?" Alcaito's jestbook

I have a very vocal cat. Pacifically (sic): a Tonkinese, which is supposed to be a cross between a Siamese and a Burmese. Since neither of these countries existed when this breed was created, my cat may be a lurking illegal alien. Or as we like to call them here in mellow inland San Diego, uninvited guest. She’s vocalizing at the moment, pacing up and down the halls whining that she needs love, which, like we all do. Lily is a bit “dumb” in a “cute-but” kind of way. I say it’s no small wonder we all don’t pace and whine like she does – though perhaps with less righteous passion than her walnut-sized brain can muster. I prefer to assume she’s crying for me than to worry that she might be a terrorist-in-waiting, a sort of sleeper-cat, and that she’s really crying “Death to America”.

Besides, at least my Tonkinese cat has “papers.” My camera and my new pressure cooker also have papers too, which means I could ship them to my sister in Arizona, no questions asked. Or at least, questions about papers answered. So my pressure cooker would be a more comfortable resident of Arizona than the bilingual American citizens who use leaf blowers to clean my front yard.

I am not worried about alien invasions. I am also immune to the scary threats of fools. With the possible exception of my cat, I do not to suffer fools gladly. But, like a psychic once told me at the fair, at least I do suffer glad foolishly. I could spend all day with her (my cat, silly) (not the fair psychic) on my shoulder as I rock her, purring advice into my hearing aid.

Finally, needing something better to do with my idleness, I managed to clean up the patio yesterday. The guys just blow the leaves and pine needles into corners for mice to inhabit. A job that once took me an hour, now takes me most of the afternoon. My gardening is becoming more like tai chi – slow, purposeful and conducive to meditation, rather than the ass-kicking karate gardening I did in my prime.

In addition to the cat purring into my hearing aid therapy, I need any exercise that serves to lengthen my attention span while it stretches my kinking muscles. These days, my tired muscles are the kinkiest part of my life. Fortunately, I have all day to accomplish this task of cleaning up the patio, and find the finished product just as satisfying as if I’d done it in an hour.

The yard guys who come every other Friday mainly keep the sorry all front yard hill from pegging out at the bottom end of the curb appeal scale. The state of my front yard is not quite at the point where I dot the landscape with a few cars on blocks, a whimsically placed old door-less refrigerator laying on its back and breeding pestilence, and hostile parasitic net of acid yellow dodder vines slowly engulfing rusty piles of unidentifiable junk. Not quite.

Global What Now?

2010-08-02T13:02:00.001-07:00

" I sit. And I listen.
When I return to California,
to my life with its many engines—I find myself changed,
the city somehow muted, frenetic and fully charged with living, yes,
but still, when gifted with this silence, motions have more
of a dance to them, like fish in schools of hunger, once
flashing in sunlight, now turning in shadow. "
- Brian Turner Here Bullet

Horoscope Update: The good news is that no pianos hit me yesterday. The bad news is that today’s horoscope says I’m in a coma tomorrow from being hit by a piano yesterday. So this might not be an actual post, it might be a figment of my imagination.

Long Hot Summer: The month of June was, according to the Guardian UK, was “the hottest June recorded worldwide, figures show.” Furthermore, “US government climate data suggests 2010 on course to be warmest year since records began.”

Here’s the article, referenced by the Guardian, which is referring to information released in July by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), suggest that 2010 is now on course to be the warmest year since records began in 1880.

Don’t Cry for Me El Cajon

2010-07-31T14:16:00.001-07:00

“I used to think that everyone was just being funny but now I don't know. I mean, how can you tell? “
- Andy Warhol

Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters are fighting ethics charges (13 and 1, respectively); so I readily admit I’m not the only person who is worrying about things beyond my control. Wait. Ethics violations ARE within the control of the alleged violator! Unless we want to all agree that we are all victims of the vast conspiracies swirling around our collective ankles like we were wading through trash swirling around a plugged sewer. Why would we do that?

Since I live SoCal, I’m stressing about my horoscope that says I’ll be hit by a falling piano tomorrow. I’m also updating my dream journal - which reads more like a nightmare journal these days - and wondering what Noah would have said about global climate change if he wrote a column for Salon.com.

On the upside, I’ve just put some sweet peaches fresh from yesterday’s farmer’s market in a concoction of Jack, 10-year-old Portuguese port, and a splash of butterscotch liquor, together with a bit of grated ginger and sugar. (First cut a small cross on the bottom of each peach; then pour boiling water on them and let them sit about 2 minutes; then the peel comes neatly off without taking any of the fruit). The stuff has to sit and yummify for 3 months, so it should be ready for Thanksgiving and Xmas (if it lasts that long).

In other news, I’m trying to decide whether watching the 7-minute Toytanic video HERE is the second- or third- best 7 minutes of my life. Let’s just say this re-enactment has characters that are stuffed animals, it includes some profanity; and it is much quicker to sit through than James Cameron’s version. I think it also hits all the major plot twists Cameron does, so you don’t have to trade two un-recoverable hours of your life in order not to miss much of the actual story. Spoiler alert: the boat sinks.

I picked a few of my very own tomatoes spared by the rabbits. Tomorrow we roast! It occurs to me too late that the upside-down hanging planters simply give the rabbits better access to the fruit. If I put land mines below the tomatoes to deter the bunnies, my tomatoes would probably be tainted by a stew of C4 and exploded bunny parts anyway. So, when life hands us half-eaten, almost-ripe tomatoes, I suppose we could just agree to make lemon-drop martinis.

Distinguishing Hypocrisy from Piety

2010-07-26T10:54:00.001-07:00

The Catholic Church recently equated ordination of women with pedophilia in the pantheon of evil. Oddly, while Il Papa seems to permit pedophilia with a nod and a wink, when it comes to ordaining women, it’s time to take a stand agaInst evil.

Despite being one of my favorite run-on sentences, Moliere said it better than I could in Tartuffe:

“No, I am not a revered doctor, brother; no, all the knowledge of this world has not found its abode in me. I have merely the science of discerning truth from falsehood. And as I know nothing in the world so noble and so beautiful as the holy fervour of genuine piety, so there is nothing, I think, so odious as the whitewashed outside of a specious zeal; as those downright imposters, those bigots whose sacrilegious and deceitful grimaces impose on others with impunity, and who trifle as they like with all that mankind holds sacred; those men who, wholly given to mercenary ends, trade upon godliness, and would purchase honour and reputation at the cost of hypocritical looks and affected groans; who, seized with strange ardour, make use of the next world to secure their fortune in this; who, with great affectation and many prayers, daily preach solitude and retirement while they themselves live at Court; who know how to reconcile their zeal with their vices; who are passionate, revengeful, faithless, full of deceit, and who, to work the destruction of a fellow-man, insolently cover their fierce resentment with the cause of Heaven. They are so much the more dangerous in that they, in their bitter wrath, use against us those weapons which men revere; and their anger, which everybody lauds, assassinates us with a consecrated weapon. There are too many such mean hypocrites in the world; but from them the truly pious are easy to distinguish.”

Click here to read Cleante’s entire speech here.

Bad News, Everyone

2010-07-21T11:34:00.000-07:00

"Certainly it constitutes bad news when the people who agree with you are buggier than batshit."
— Philip K. Dick

I live in a place that can be charitably described as redneck adjacent. There is a camel that lives in a tiny suburban ranch a few blocks from my house, along with a few horses, the occasional goat and donkey. We have inexplicably named the camel Elizabeth, and we get worried if we don’t see her outside when we drive by. I have claimed to spot penguins in one corral, and once I’m pretty sure I saw a unicorn. Nobody in my circle of friends gives credence to my exotic animal sighting claims - particularly the unicorn, because I’m admittedly not a virgin.

So, the Lakeside rodeo, or at least a rodeo is coming up. One prominent sign hangs from a crane next door to a Burger King, because apparently the demographic that goes to rodeos pays attention to signs hanging from cranes while eating their burgers and fries. This is either a brilliantly targeted marketing strategy, or a cheap way to get around a county ordinance requiring signs to have permits. Unfortunately, I believe there is discrimination involved in this particular rodeo. Sadly, I doubt that there is time for me to file a lawsuit on behalf of all the girls who might want to attend.

Since we were driving around the neighborhood, we decided to stop at the local space ship cult headquarters. This sign is in their parking lot: good news, everyone. You have to google Unarius Academy of Science to get the real goods on these wackjobs, but what Unarius is selling is at least as cringeworthy as the nearby Creation and Earth History Museum in Santee – literally across the tracks from the Lakeside rodeo. The Creation Museum website says: “Biblical – Accurate - Certain” which just about says it all, with the possible exception of actual scientific research findings to back up their claims.

While we do not permit fluoride in our water here, apparently this measure has not sufficed to protect our children from exposure to local freakiness. I would say that the collective intellectual output of these institutions is informed neither by education nor reflection. But then again, perhaps I’m being too hard on the rodeo bulls.

Meanwhile, I have tomatoes! So, I’ve got that going for me. That, and the unicorn.

Look! A squirrel!

2010-07-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

“But I see that my mind is asleep.
If it stays wide awake from this moment on, we would soon reach the truth, which may even now surround us with its weeping angels!...
- If it had been wide awake until this moment, I would have never given in to degenerate instincts, long ago!...
- If it had always been wide awake, I would be floating in wisdom!...”
Arthur Rimbaud (1854 – 1891) The Impossible

This morning, it’s more like I’m floating in a swamp of distractions that substitute for thought. I feel I have the attention span of a dragonfly on crack. It’s too hot outside to even attempt to play in the backyard. I am no longer acclimated to the muggy hot climate I grew up in. The heat - maybe. The humidity - not at my advanced age and current sumo-fighting weight.

I am in my post-dollhouse-construction funk. The Wisteria House is almost done. The inside is completely done. The lights have already begun to spiral into darkness, as the crap Cir-kit lights and copper strip wiring succumb to entropy, poor design and a level of quality control rivaled by a swarm of screaming squirrels who were up all night drinking Jack and eating candy. The lights on the basement floor on the door don’t work, and probably can’t be fixed short of removing wallpaper and/or re-wiring. The 4th floor hall light I constructed from an Art Nouveau greeting card, framed and wired with lights behind each flower is also not working. This may be more easily troubleshot (I may have just coined a neologism!) and more easily fixed, but I can’t muster the enthusiasm or the attention today.

Instead, as the doll house lights begin to go out one by one, I think I can hear weeping angels over the sound of my profanity.

Tech Support Guy bought me this shell dollhouse back at the turn of the century. The outside was painted pink and encrusted with lime green Victorian gingerbread trim. I decided to avoid the cliché of Victorian décor in favor of Art Nouveau - particularly the French style, which flourished from about the 1890s to about 1910, when overtaken by déclassé Art Deco and the Great War. I got stuck for several years trying to create a wood tile floor on the second (main) floor). Geometry was not one of my stronger skills: my math skills – once rivaling those of a room of monkeys writing War and Peace in cursive - have degenerated along with the rest of my baser instincts.

When I finally finished the floor by abandoning the pattern and kluging the tiles in a place now covered by an area rug, I managed to wake up and resume my Sisyphean attempts to electrify the dollhouse.

Faulty electricity, and more particularly, the abysmal products available for dollhouses made mostly by a company called Cir-Kit, have relentlessly hounded my steps and complicated my wiring like an ever worsening case of a hobo with tuberculosis left untreated by antibiotics. Both the hobo and Cir-Kit wiring will ultimately die alone in the dark. Just when you think you’ve managed to get the lights in stable and working order, a passing squirrel, an earthquake, or even a mild sigh of satisfaction, will cause them to tremble and go dark. To be fair, the electrical lights sold under the Miniature House brand are equally worthless: both probably made by the same demented manufacturer.

Perhaps a visit to the farmer’s market later this afternoon will revive my attention and help me reach some version of the truth. If not the truth of dollhouse electrical wiring, then perhaps the wisdom of roasting tomatoes. This time, if I manage to avoid writing monkeys, screaming squirrels and other passing distractions, I think I’ll use more garlic and go with thyme instead of basil. Next, who knows? World domination?

Repent!

2010-07-14T12:15:00.000-07:00

"When error is irreparable, repentance is useless."
- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Summer is here. The weather went from our lovely, seemingly endless mild spring to summer yesterday. It took about ten minutes. One minute they were fine; the next minute my sunflowers lost all enthusiasm and wilted, their heads nodding in despair. While a little water cheered them up, it didn’t inspire me to tend to the other projects in the back yard. Pictured here are not my sunflowers but some mammoth sunflowers in the Veggie Garden.

Back home, I have finally found a place for my nameless succulent with the lovely nebari. Here it is near the pond, but not so near that night hunters like skunks and possums will knock it into the water when they come to drink, perchance to hunt. Tech Support Guy has recently installed several new electronic surveillance to protect the koi while the water lilies recover their recent re-potting and grow back to give them some cover. We have a motion-activated light that, imho, simply provides better visibility for night fishing by predators. But the theory is that it will get our attention inside the house, and we can then step outside and aim the super-soaker which is water laced with a little ammonia – at the invaders.

We also have a motion activated radio turned to a talk radio station that spouts sermons all about the coming apocalypse and demanding repentance. The radio sits just outside our bedroom door leading to the patio where the birdseed is kept in critter-proof containers. The radio doesn’t stop the possums from knocking the birdseed containers around the patio in attempts to break in, but it does alert us so we can chase them away.

It turns out that the motion-activated radio is particularly effective in waking me in the middle of the night. When visitors approach the birdseed containers, the radio turns on for about a minute. There is nothing like sudden shouted threats of fire and brimstone to brighten the dark night of my soul. Who actually listens to this stuff?

Also pond-adjacent is a simple red pelargonium, with its defiant flower, standing like a sentry next to the stone bridge. I pride myself that every pelargonium in my yard is borrowed: some from cuttings donated by friends; some clipped from the roadside of gardens on summer evening auto trips around the neighborhood. Such trips to liberate cuttings don’t count as stealing in my eyes. Some of the plants now in flower in my yard are no longer extant in the locations where I originally cut them, so my specimens effectively saved these particular plants from extinction.

Later last night - after a brief nighttime propagation trip - the radio (or maybe Jesus, directly) spoke to me. Fortunately for the salvation of my soul, I am hearing impaired. Without my hearing aid, all I heard were muttered exhortations that gradually devolved into incoherence as I returned to my dreams. Such distractions don’t awaken guilt in my deaf heart, for I sleep the sleep of the just. I’m afraid that I am with Gibbon on the utility of repentance, particularly when such urgings awaken me from a peaceful sound sleep.

Roasted Tomato Sauce

2010-07-12T10:41:00.000-07:00

"Many women have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant actions; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity, perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred spot and sank unswept into oblivion."
George Elliot, Middlemarch

My daughter and I worked out this recipe to make the most wonderful tomato sauce. So, I've got that going for me.

5 lbs tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
6 cloves of garlic (more to taste)
1/8 cup olive oil
1/8 cup balsamic vinegar
sea salt and pepper to taste

I use only the best organic ingredients.Toss ingredients in a bowl to coat with oil and vinegar. Spread in a single layer in roasting pan. The secret to getting a sweet sauce is to roast at 250F for at least 4 hours, until the ingredients caramelize.

Cool and put through food mill, medium grater. For this recipe, I started with 5 lbs 2.8 oz of tomato/onion/garlic and ended up with just over 4 cups or 16 ounces of sauce.

Heat and top homemade pizza or pasta.

This recipe may not constitute a constant unfolding of far-resonant actions, but the taste evokes a certain spiritual grandeur, particularly when used to top a pizza using homemade pizza dough. So, notwithstanding the relative meanness of opportunity I may have experienced, this sauce may be all that stands between me and a life of tragic failure that will sink into oblivion.

To can, put in sterile jars. Ball Blue Book says leave ½” at top of tomato jars, but I left a bit more room and managed to almost fill five 8-ounce jars. Boil in canning pot 35 minutes.

Herbs: if using thyme or oregano, chop fresh herbs and toss and roast with tomatoes. If using basil, I put a few whole leaves on top of sauce before sealing jars to boil.

Hard Beset

2010-07-06T12:13:00.001-07:00

“Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope:
I am in nature none of these.

“I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

“In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile”.
- Elinor Wylie

Three large koi survive in the now crystal clear pond. They are not used to being so exposed to eagle-eyed predators like the great heron or gophers with opposable thumbs fishing in the night. We had to put an old piece of plastic latticework into the pond to give them another place to hide. You can clearly see two in this picture. The silver/white one with black fishscale pattern is Becky. The third fish is visible at the bottom of the picture: his tail is all that is visible from above the rock.

But for close to twenty years, they have survived predations, weather, neglect and other hardships nature has thrown at them. I believe they will survive my spring pond cleaning.

We harvested a giant sunflower from the veggie garden this morning. Ms. Smarty Plants is keeping it with a few other flower heads as a demonstration when she leads school tours through The Water Conservation Garden.

Nature doesn’t waste a thing, although I doubt that hungry birds or foraging bunnies in the garden will harvest these particular seeds. Instead, gangs of elementary school children will learn that what I see as a beautiful geometric work of art is nature’s gift of nourishment for wildlife.

These days, I feel more like the spiky thistle. My aches and pains are harder to ignore after a morning in the garden. The artichoke flower pictured here is from wild roadside artichokes that offer little meat for people, so we decided to let them go to seed and attract pollinators for our tomatoes. Adapted to virtually no water while they grow, the artichoke/thistles are thriving in our irrigated garden.

Gardening as I age is a lesson in humility. I am not so adaptive as the thistle. But so far, no garden challenge has merited my fear and many still provide me with a smile.

Spring Cleaning Memories

2010-07-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

" Memory is continually created, a story told and retold, using jigsaw pieces of experience. It's utterly unreliable in some ways, because who can say whether the feeling or emotion that seems to belong to the recollection actually belongs to it rather than being available from the general store of likely emotions we have learned? Memory is not false in the sense that it is willfully bad, but it is excitingly corrupt in its inclination to make a proper story of the past." Jenny Diski

I put on the extra large waders and ventured into the pond yesterday, which turned out to jog the jigsaw memories on the card table of my mind. You can see how shallow the pond is – barely rcovering my knees.

This excursion into the pond recalled memories of other chapters the story of love and loss in our backyard pond. Koi need at least 4 feet of depth to survive predatory attacks from great heron, gophers and skunks. Let's just say my knees are way less than 4 feet deep. Since the last midnight massacre a few years back, we have lost all our sparkling golden and white friends, some of them 20+ years old.

But despite the death of most of the fauna, the flora survived. Hardy pink water lilies, toad lilies, some lovely tall pond plant with fragrant short-lived purple spikes of flower, and a free floating grass mat so thick that small songbirds could miraculously walk around on it. Since we no longer stock the pond or visit our long lost koi, plants dine on the layer of excitingly corrupt muck at the bottom. The plants have overrun the pond like Godzilla rampaging a tiny black and white model of Tokyo.

I waded unarmed into a Mekong delta jungle of the pond’s thriving water-plant habitat. There was much more below the water that didn’t meet the eye, providing a metaphor for the under-water oil plumes overtaking the Gulf. Outgrowing pots, the water plants settled in the 5-year-old decomposing muck on the bottom. The primordial ooze forms with fallen leaves and pine needles a few surprisingly large branches, decomposing plant matter, fish feces, and several various and heavy stones – once stacked to give cover and long since having collapsed in rubble

And the smell. I plunged up to my arms into the muck, with each splash anointing myself in this eau d’ mud. I can think of nothing so excitingly corrupt as that smell of old pond muck, slurping and draining on the side of a muddy pond and beginning to dry out. I could still smell it my hands this morning, despite a very long and very olfactory product-laden shower last night.

I wouldn't know an “excitingly corrupt” inclinations to re-write history if it bit my hand; but I do remember that yesterday was pretty corrupt.

On second thought this morning, I'm thinking that there are a lot worse ways to be corrupt than exciting. Riding the sled of life down the increasingly slippery slope, I submit that delightfully exciting is a lovely kind of corrupt to become. Moreover, I don’t care whether I’m newly learning it, or whether I'm just trying to remember today's story. What matters is that I’m already halfway to becoming excitingly corrupt myself.

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2010-06-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

"Hark to the rush of the bird’s wings. Majesty, so close around us. They say the gods send u messages in their flight…"
Zachary Mason, "Guest Friend" from The Lost Books of the Odyssey

I can't interpret what the noisy birds are trying to tell me this morning. The error message seems to illustrate the relative paucity of inspiration I have received from my garden lately. The weather outside is doing its best to break the world record for being the stereotypical impossibly lovely springtime afternoon, but it feels like a cliché. The tomatoes are getting bigger but not redder. The sunflowers are stretching higher while greedily holding on to the promise of giant Van Gogh blooms. Everything is getting ready, but nothing is quite here: like a blank canvas, or one with only the ghostly outlines of the first rough sketch.

And yet I wait inside for inspiration, preferring to retreat to the doll house in the back room that nears completion (the house, not the room). Or if not actual completion, at least a state that approaches that briefest moment in eternity where all the lights work together at the same time – a state that races toward the entropy of total darkness the minute I put the soldering iron aside to cool down and plug in the lights for a test. Stupid doll house wiring.

I’m not quite sure what I’m searching for exactly, only that I feel the restless lethargy of someone who knows that as soon as I step outside and begin to sweat the garden will capture and channel my energy somewhere fine. It’s just that I can’t quite recall such a mood at the moment. I can’t muster the focus or the energy to tour the back yard only to observe all the things that need attention. Instead, I make another cup of coffee and browse the innertetz for inspiration - like playing with a Ouija board that delivers only a cryptic error message, and that does little to calm my twitching unfocused energy.

This is exactly the mood that gardening cures. So what am I waiting for?

A Bitter Lesson

2010-06-20T12:03:00.001-07:00

"Actions speak louder than worms."
Roddy Lumsden

The only part of my garden that suffered in my one-week absence was the compost pile that didn’t get watered. Most of the container plants were all positioned near a sprinkler set on a timer to give them 5 minutes in the morning and 5 more in the later afternoon.

The rest of my container plants, my veggie garden and other miscellaneous cultivated patches amid the general dry neglect were also watered by a timed sprinkler for a similar ten minutes a day. I discovered a luscious cucumber yesterday, and dozens of green tomatoes wanting only a bit more time to develop their sweet red flavor.

Instead of being grateful, or relieved, I’m feeling - oddly - betrayed. My traitorous plants thrived in my absence. I take this thinly veiled slap in the face (is that a mixed metaphor?) from the gardening gods as a message that I don’t give my garden the amount of water it needs. It seems, my habitual gardening efforts were actually holding them all back. Even the camellia, previously stationed at the edge of the irrigation system and looking like a goner, has begun to sprout new leaves and even a few buds. Terrific!

If my plants had shown me a few wilted leaves; some yellowing or shriveling; some bug-nibbled-around-the-edges leaves, there would have been a joyous celebration of the return of the gardener to the struggling garden. Instead, I feel only bitter disappointment that nobody seemed to miss me very much.

Perhaps a more generous spirit would find this a cause for joy, or at least for relief. Instead, I find myself feeling that I am not only superfluous, but actually, probably (almost certainly) detrimental to my plants. The ungrateful bastards! At least my kitties were glad to seem me come home.

Rapturous Monotony

2010-06-17T13:22:00.001-07:00

“It is a terrible terrain
No mortal eye has seen
Whose image still seduces me
This morning as it fades…

“Sleep is full of miracles!
Some impulse in my dream
Had rid the region I devised
Of every growing thing,

“And proud of the resulting scene
I savored in my art
The rapturous monotony
Of metal, water, stone…”

Charles Baudelaire, “Parisian Dream, ”Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil)

As long as I’ve lived in the outskirts of the Sonoran Desert of the Southwest California, I have never learned to see it as lovely. Driving back and forth across the middle of this desert last week simply confirmed my opinion that the desert is an empty wasteland. Having lived in the urban east coast and west coasts of America my entire life, I am always amazed at how big and empty of human habitation the middle of the US is, especially in the high deserts.

I know my opinion of the barren desert is uninformed, biased, and simply wrong. But it’s mine.

So, we went across this high, dry grassland in Arizona that was formerly a vast floodplain, to visit the Petrified Forest (which, to my eye, is more like a petrified, scattered wood pile). According to the U. S. National Park Service brochure from the Petrified Forest/Painted Desert, trees growing on the banks of the once-numerous streams became fossils as the water dried up. “The trees, Araucarioxylon, Woodworthia, Schilderia, and others, fell, and swollen streams washed them into adjacent floodplains. A mix of silt, mud, and volcanic ash buried the logs. This sediment cut off oxygen and slowed the logs’ decal. Silica-laden groundwater seeped through the logs and replaced the original wood tissues with silica deposits. Eventually the silica crystallized into quartz, and the logs were preserved as petrified wood.”

The Painted Desert seems even more barren and lifeless to my gardener’s eyes than the Petrified Forest. The Painted Desert was also millions of years in the making. According to the Arizona Leisure Vacation Guide:

“It took millions upon millions of years for nature to create this natural canvas of unimaginable design that some describe it as a multi-colored layered cake. The Painted Desert draws upon the earth’s indecisive nature. From shifts in the earth’s crust brought about by temperamental volcanoes and earthquakes to complete inundation by fresh and sea waters alike, a veritable host of elements have breathed life into this area. Colorful sediments of bentonite clay and sandstone, stacked in elegant layers, feed off the setting Arizona sun in an ever-changing display of colorful splendor.”

One man’s colorful splendor is another man’s barren wasteland. I apologize in advance to those who see these places as variations on Mother Nature’s creative and diverse landscaping style, but the few stunted and struggling plants and wildflowers we saw simply reminded me how harsh the environment is toward growing things today. I don’t need to be reminded of this.

My preference for the transience of flora over the very literally glacially slow changes of desert environments may be another manifestation of my impatience, my temperament so intolerant of sluggishness; and my preference for soft, brief life, over hard unyielding stone. Or it may simply be that I will always appreciate ephemeral seasonal changes more, and simply resent the slow-motion geological changes that I can only witness as snapshots frozen in the moment of my comparatively brief existence.

Desert Driving

2010-06-13T08:04:00.000-07:00

We managed to get through interminable Texas yesterday. Too many oil dericks, giant windmills, and billboards about Jesus and the approach of judgement day. If I could figure out how to get photos from my phone to blogspot, I could include one of the strangest images from Texas: at a roadside Dairy Queen, right next to the counter, a rack displaying bull whips for sale.

So we went through El Paso Texas, where the interstate highway follows the Rio Grande river for a few miles. This is the border between The US and Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The lovely high black chain-link border fence is on the US side of the river adjacent to a flat cleared no-man's-land where green and white Border Patrol vans circle endlessly back and forth. Because the land rises on either side of the river bank, the people on each side have a lovely view of each other.

We spent the night in Las Crucas New Mexico. We may have escaped from Texas, but crappy country music followed us to Eddie's Place, the restaurant/cocktail lounge where we had dinner.

We are back on the road. We will go through Tuscon and Yuma Arizona and then home to San Diego late this evening. We cross the last time zone - from Mountain to Pacific time, gaining an hour, but we still have a 12 hour, 650 mile day ahead. It will be worth it though, to get back to the land where you can order martinis from a menu of a dozen exotic choices.

Going Home

2010-06-12T07:22:00.001-07:00

We have decided to return to San Diego bypassing the high desert areas and heading farther south. We will not take Route 40/"Historic" Route 66. The rout will take us to Roswell NM tonight. The road ahead of us looks strangely familiar, but I have never been here before. Then we realize it looks like those pictures taken from storm chaser vehicles. There are virtually no other cars on the road, and open fields on either side, with the rare farmhouse a silo.

J graduated from Basic Combat Training at noon yesterday and an hour after we returned her to Fort Sill she texted us to say "We are shipping out at 23:00 no sleep necessary."

it was wonderful to see her but bittersweet to say goodbye for at least a other three months. She is in Fort Benning by now, beginning OCS.

Today Texas. Tonight Oklahoma

2010-06-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

We made it safely through Arizona yesterday without having to show our papers. Which is a
good thing because I would have refused.

We stopped for lunch in Gallup NM. If you ate harboring fond memories of road trips along what signs now proudly proclaim as "Historic Route 66, get over them. Gallup now has their own Wal*Mart and Home Depot. We had lunch at an Applebees, " eatin' good in the neighborhood". But all local color was not lost. Tech Support Guy had a reubin sandwich and the wait person asked if he would like
it well done. Better still, my Marguerita was served in a brimming 12 oz glass. Drinkin' good in Gallup.

The other bizzare event was passing a man dressed as a Fransiscan monk (including a rope around the waist of ho long brown robe) and carrying a life-sized cross on his shoulder. As if this wasn't weird enough, he was spotted in the high desert east of Albequerque at 6,200 feet elevation, where I was gasping for oxygen.

On the Road

2010-06-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

We spent last night in Flagstaff Arizona at the dizzying altitude oa 6,500 feet. This was not particularly enjoyable for Tech Support Guy who suffers from COPD. We are now on Interstate 40 East and down to 4868 feet, 1485 meters. I love the apps on my iPhone.

We passed through Winslow, which according to the Meteor Crater channel (1620 AM) is "The City in Motion". We passed through Winslow in the time it took me to write this sentence. There is no Starbucks in Winslow.

Nor is there a bilboard ordinance. Billboards may the chief source of revenue in Winslow.

Good Luck with That

2010-06-05T10:49:00.001-07:00

“In a mucked up lovely river,
I cast my little fly.
I look at that river and smell it
and it makes me wanna cry.
Oh to clean our dirty planet,
now there's a noble wish,
and I'm puttin my shoulder to the wheel
'cause I wanna catch some fish.”
Greg Brown, Spring Wind

This is not my regular everyday post about gardens. I found somebody else who feels the same heartsickness about the oil spill that I do. I have no idea if these people are crazies or journalists. But I also don’t know if I’m crazy, so we're all in good company.

“Louisiana will be the new Bhopal…. This is what it means to get the government off the backs of big business…. You wanted deregulation? You're soaking in it. “
Read the full post here.